Baltimore InnerSpace

Key Highway / Light Street Update

2012-01-10T16:20:00.000-05:00

An intersection design that actually works -

Without the drama

The intersection of Key Highway and Light Street is totally inappropriate for a roundabout. Here's a simple design solution that actually works. Essentially, the two existing islands on Key Highway and Light Street would simply be enlarged to tighten up the intersection of northbound Light Street and the southbound left turn movement that crosses over it. This very tight intersection with minimum length pedestrian crosswalks would be controlled by a simple two-phase traffic signal. Pedestrians would cross Key Highway while Light Street through traffic moves, and would cross Light Street while Key Highway traffic moves - so simple even a BC-DOT employee could do it.

A third median island would then be constructed to totally remove southbound Light Street from the intersection. This island would start at Montgomery Street and extend as far north as desired. Essentially southbound Light Street would function as a quiet single-lane local service road with parking and any other appropriate desired traffic calming measures such as speed humps and "Stop for Pedestrians" pylons. It would also be possible to extend the southbound Light Street island separating "arterial" traffic destined for Key Highway and "local " traffic destined for Federal Hill as far north as Conway Street. While this would be an excellent way of minimizing the heavy traffic exposure on the adjacent land uses (Christ Church Apartments, Harbor Court Condos/Hotel), it would tend to make this seem like a permanent solution.

This design should be much cheaper than a roundabout. The railroad track wouldn't even need to be removed, unless the city wanted to. It would probably be preferable to keep this as cheap as possible, in keeping with the idea that it would only be temporary until the city comes to its senses and decides to create a more permanent solution with a narrower Light Street along the entire Inner Harbor.

Proposed intersection design, with a new median island starting at the Montgomery Street intersection (left/south end) to totally separate southbound Light Street through traffic from the Key Highway intersection. This median could be extended as far north (right) as desired. The two existing islands (center) would also be enlarged, with a new "bump out" (center left) to tighten up the remaining intersection as much as possible. The Science Center is at the lower right.

Roundabout at Key Highway / Light Street

2012-01-06T14:32:00.000-05:00

An Inner Harbor roundabout for all the wrong reasons

The real problem is that Light Street is about twice as wide as it should be. A roundabout at the end of this stretch of the Inner Harbor in front of the Science Center (upper left) would only add to its problems.

The only good thing that can be said about the city's latest proposal for a roundabout at the intersection of Key Highway and Light Street is that there is plenty of space for it. But it would be just another Inner Harbor doo-dad that ignores actual traffic conditions and long-term needs.

The proposed roundabout looks nice in the city's birds-eye sketch, shown here in the Sun, but from the street view Light Street would still be an excessive mass of concrete.

Unlike the existing traffic circle at Harbor East, a Key/Light roundabout would not be fed by suitably scaled streets. Harbor East planners made sure that most through traffic was diverted to Fleet Street and Eastern Avenue so that the traffic circle would be a relaxed and attractive pedestrian focal point. But at Light and Key Highway, the center of the circle would be off-limits to pedestrians.

And unlike the Towson Circle, Key/Light is not a complex intersection where heavy traffic converges from five opposing directions. That is the kind of difficult situation where the intense motorist interaction inherent in a roundabout is necessary and indispensable. In contrast to Towson, the right turn from Key Highway to northbound Light Street is the only major movement other than Light Street. The total traffic volume is less than one-fifth of what the Towson Circle carries.

But most crucially, a roundabout at this location would sidestep the fundamental problem of Light Street in the Inner Harbor. Light Street is simply far too wide - about 125 feet curb-to-curb. Light Street's grotesque width is actually a detriment to orderly traffic flow. Motorists jockey for position and don't know which lane they should use. The lanes don't line up from one side of the intersection to the other. Pedestrians are lost in the shuffle. The overall width of the roadway north of the intersection could easily be reduced from 125 feet to two 11-foot lanes in each direction (44 feet total).

The city knows this. Their roundabout plan includes a very awkward taper of the southbound Light Street approach to the intersection from five lanes down to two lanes. This is the kind of precipitous necking-down that is normally used only to approach emergency construction and accident zones, with temporary orange cones, flashing lights and electronic message signs. But here it would be permanent.

The intersection's major pedestrian movement is across the Key Highway leg, and here the traffic pattern would remain basically unchanged, with the same wide sweeping curb alignment adjacent to the Science Center. The big difference is that the current green/yellow/red traffic signals would be replaced by Yield signs, creating the kind of ambiguous environment that is seldom favorable for pedestrians. Traffic would be allowed to intimidate pedestrians even more than usual. Yes, motorists should "learn" how to yield to pedestrians. People have been saying that forever. But it only happens in a pedestrian-oriented environment, and as long as the Inner Harbor is disoriented from the adjacent overscaled streets, it will not happen.

The city plan's only real nod to pedestrians is to spiff up the medians so that anyone stranded in the middle of the streets waiting for traffic will not suffer too much. Right now, there is only a small concrete island on Key Highway, and there is no median at all to the south on Light Street. Out in suburbia, a median strip may seem like an oasis, but the Inner Harbor should be able to do better.

The most well-used Key Highway crosswalk would remain about the same, except traffic would be controlled by only a Yield sign instead of the red light shown. The small median in the foreground would also be upgraded, since most pedestrians would not be able to cross the entire intersection at once.

The wider view should be narrower streets

The real solution is that instead of a wrongheaded roundabout, Light Street should be drastically narrowed. But the city wants to avoid a real solution because it would demand that they look at the much larger stretch of Light Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor, it would require real planning, it would cost real money, and it would impinge upon their sacred Grand Prix race. Even the city's long range Inner Harbor plan shows only a modest narrowing of Light Street to get rid of the McKeldin Square, recent home of the Occupy Camp.

Of course, Light Street could easily be narrowed by half in the near term using some kind of cheap delineation that is effective but far less expensive. All the traffic in both directions could be squeezed onto one side of the existing median, with the other side used for something else. Even a parking lot would have a far more human scale than the existing monster street, and it could easily serve double-duty for a farmer's market, street fairs or whatnot. The existing northbound lanes of Light Street adjacent to the Science Center line up very nicely with the street south of the intersection toward the Federal Hill business district. The result would be a nice normal narrow three-legged signalized "T" intersection.

Even an inexpensive narrowing of Light Street would have great benefits far beyond the Key Highway intersection. Farther north at the Conway Street crosswalk, adjacent to Harborplace and the Visitors Center, Light Street even more desperately needs to be narrowed (see top photo).

But for the city designers, a roundabout fills the bill because it looks pretty in their sketches, and it would allow them to put something memorable and symbolic in the center of the circle.

All in all, the proposed roundabout is another example of how the auto domination of the 1950-1970s era still haunts Baltimore. Light Street was originally widened to its current bloated width in the early '70s in anticipation of feeding the expressway system and to replace Calvert Street along the water with the Inner Harbor promenade. Even the proposed expressway bridge next to Federal Hill looked good to the original designers who drew the sketches. The proposed Light Street/Key Highway roundabout at the same location has the same kind of geometric appeal - until you become a pedestrian or driver trying to cross it.

Mount Vernon vs. Jones Falls Bikeway

2011-12-14T10:22:00.000-05:00

Desolate Jones Falls Bikeway blows opportunity to create a livable Mount Vernon neighborhood

Bikeway now under construction is wedged between the desolation of the Prison District (left) and the Jones Falls Expressway. (The MTA hasn't bothered to move their bus stop out of the way yet.)

Trying to make the city safer for cyclists sounds like a laudable goal, but the city has once again shown that it is oblivious to its most important priority - neighborhoods.

Mount Vernon has been clamoring for decades for relief from traffic. Simply, it cannot become a normal cohesive neighborhood as long as many tens of thousands of cars descend daily upon its tight residential streets. Bicyclists have been among the greatest victims. Bikes should be an ideal transportation mode for the historic high density neighborhood, except that the streets are overwhelmed by cars.

The solution is straightforward: Divert as much traffic as possible into the underutilized Jones Falls corridor just to the east, to free up the local residential streets for humans, bikes, and above all, peace and quiet. But the city has never seen fit to do any of that.

The city's latest solution is to move the bikes out of the community, not the cars. The community will continue to suffer while their potential two-wheeled allies flee. Mount Vernon will continue to be squeezed as monster parking garages increasingly become the primary transportation option, even for so-called "transit-oriented development" serving the University of Baltimore, which ought to be a natural ally for bikes and livability.

Residential St. Paul Street in Mount Vernon is taken over by noisy obnoxious traffic, which is why the city is putting the new bikeway in the "solitude" next to the prison and expressway.

If the Jones Falls corridor was any kind of decent environment for bikes, maybe it would justify pushing them out of the community. But this is the Prison District, in the shadow of the imposing Jones Falls Expressway, not a place with urban charm. And while the traffic volume is low, it also tends to move as fast as possible, taking advantage of the desolation as cars weave on and off the expressway or dodge the other traffic doing so.

And the bikeway now under construction combines the worst aspects of bikes on sidewalks and on exclusive bike lanes. It separates the bikes as much as possible, but not at the inevitable intersection conflict points where there are strong opportunities for cars to hook in front of bikes, and for bikes to intimidate the few pedestrians who must walk in this forbidding environment. This can have tragic results.

Car turning right in conflict with the bikeway at Fallsway/Eager next to the prison. The new cobblestone barrier forces turning vehicles to cross over the bikeway, mostly at excessive speed.

Conditions will be even worse beyond the exclusive bikeway segments now under construction. One of the reasons this bike route has never been established up until now is that there are some truly horrible intersections as the expressway transitions into downtown. Right now, one can only imagine the bastardized intersection configurations that will emerge as the bike route is completed to the Inner Harbor in the next year or two.

Beyond that, the city has a more "permanent" longer range plan for Pratt Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor which includes a truly dangerous bike lane segregated from traffic except at the driveways and intersections, where it would be a death trap. The worst of these locations is at Pratt and President Streets, where the segregated Pratt Street bike lane is proposed as just dumping unceremoniously into the southwest quadrant of the intersection at the point of the extremely heavy eastbound to southbound right turn movement heading to Harbor East and Fells Point. Here's the plan, including a pretty picture labeled "Pratt & President 'after" which conveniently cuts off the deadly intersection.

It is unlikely that this more extensive long-range Inner Harbor street plan (including Light Street) will be done anytime soon, however, due to its cost, but more importantly due to the city's preoccupation with the struggling Baltimore Grand Prix. Bikes may be higher on the city's current pecking order than people and communities, but 175 mph Grand Prix racers trump all. The race course does not extend this far east, but does include Light Street and its intersection with Pratt just to the west.

Without livable neighborhoods, all the city's other goals fade into insignificance. If urban communities like Mount Vernon are not made attractive as places to live, the city's lofty plans for downtown, the Inner Harbor, and an extensive bikeway system will only isolated elements for hype with little potential for long term growth.

St. Paul Street trafficway in Mount Vernon neighborhood. Penn Station is two blocks away in the background.

The city should concentrate as much heavy traffic as possible into corridors like the Jones Falls - on the expressway as well as next to it. Then the city should focus on creating calm, normal, livable environments in its neighborhoods and "people places" like around the Inner Harbor. This is best for traffic, best for bikes and best for people. If this is not done, all will become increasingly dysfunctional.

Isn't it better to ride a bike through a calm, healthy urban neighborhood than on a bike lane sandwiched between a prison and an expressway?

Ripley's Believe It or Harborplace

2011-11-07T09:32:00.004-05:00

Ripley in Harborplace? Believe it or Not!
Put it in Camden Yards instead

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was right after all: Baltimore's recent Grand Prix was a "game changer". Or more accurately, the game has changed, and that crazy spectacle of 180 mph racecars careening around the Inner Harbor is now the Inner Harbor norm. Anything goes. And as the game changes, other incongruous scenes like a proposed Ferris Wheel, a billion dollar mega-arena convention center or a tent city encampment "occupying" McKeldin Square should be expected as opportunities present themselves.

In such an environment, a giant cartoon Chessie Monster adorning Harborplace would be consistent. Believe it or not, that is the question. Ripley's "Believe it or Not" Odditorium is the latest prospective client being wooed to Harborplace, Baltimore's front-and-center imagemaker.

Never mind that the city's powers-that-be had only recently declared that they were trying to make Harborplace more appealing to regular Baltimoreans and not just tourists, including the burgeoning population of downtown residents, as they gushed over the introduction of mundane but useful franchised suburban imports such as H&M and the Noodles Company. Obviously, an Ripley Odditorium is the kind of sideshow which would be precisely at odds with that. And never mind the recent controversy over whether Denise Whiting's "hon" empire represented a disparaging caricature rather than genuine Baltimore. The cartoon Chessie Monster goes way way beyond "hon" or a pink flamingo.

City officials think they can somehow straddle the fence. They obviously know there is a limit to how crass the Inner Harbor can get. They're just looking for that limit. A three dimensional Chessie Monster jutting out from the classic Harborplace facade has been declared unacceptable, but two dimensional is OK. A fierce looking monster is said to be unacceptable, but if he looks sufficiently playful, that's OK. Just as the previously proposed "Crash Cafe" was excessively fierce and three dimensional, especially for the 911 era, but a giant electric guitar on a smoke stack has passed muster. Somehow the powers that be think they can always find that magic elusive compromise between taste and commerce that turns off some people but not everyone.

How to Accommodate the Monster

OK, granted, Baltimore is still a big and multi-faceted city, so there should be room here for Ripley, Whiting and other assorted oddballs and iconoclasts to ply their trades. But Harborplace? The city's front door? The place customarily photographed to represent Baltimore the same way as the St. Louis Arch and the Seattle Space Needle? With a giant cartoon monster staring back at us?

This is exactly the kind of abuse that nearly a majority of voters were afraid of with when Harborplace was narrowly approved back in the '70s. Fortunately, developer James Rouse and architect Benjamin Thompson provided a dignified design befitting an icon, but the seeds were already planted by a civic mentality that had already destroyed much of the surroundings to build expressways that never happened. The descent into caricature-ism was then further foreshadowed when a gay-90s Mayor Schaefer jumped in the Aquarium pool with his inflated Donald Duck. But now Baltimore has gone miles and miles beyond that.

The bigger problem is why it always seems to be the Inner Harbor that is the focus of everything in Baltimore - the full gamut from the sacred to the profane? The powers that be seem to think that the rest of the city might as well not exist at all. Dense Whiting should be congratulated for applying her "hon" brand to Hampden outside of the city power structure, back when the Hampden neighborhood was really in need of a wholesome identity other than unmentionable undercurrents like "home of Baltimore's ku klux klan". Now of course, Hampden's image has grown all kinds of rich subtlety beyond the "hon" caricature, so she is less necessary but still a cute sideshow that is amusing to some.

So the Chessie Monster needs a home, somewhere in Baltimore where it can be nurtured like Whiting's "hon". Can the Chessie Monster adorn some local Main Street just as Whiting's giant pink flamingo adorns her Hampden restaurant? Does some neighborhood want to volunteer? Probably not, which is just as well because Ripley is a product of a giant multinational organization, not something amenable to Baltimore's home grown neighborhood quirks.

Camden Yards famous thousand foot warehouse, historic Camden Station and background skyline

Put Ripley in Camden Yards

Fortunately, there happens to be a place in Baltimore where such gigantism can be gracefully accommodated - Camden Yards. This is home of two giant stadiums where crass sports business hucksterism and quaint civic pride somehow coexist. It is also home of the incredible thousand foot warehouse, truly an architectural "believe it or not" even more amazing than a cartoon sea monster. Back in the '80s and '90s when planners inspired by Jane Jacobs were preaching of rich detailed fine grained street level urban tapestries, Camden Yards was able to create a new national trend of urban sports amusement districts dominated by giant stadiums. Yet it has somehow still not become as urban as it ought to be.

There has been some effort to turn Camden Yards into a well-rounded urban entertainment district. The dignified historic Camden Station has been turned into the Geppi Entertainment Museum and the Sports Legends Museum. Both of these were outgrowths of smaller nearby enterprises - the former Geppi comic book shop in Harborplace and the Babe Ruth birthplace and museum in the Ridgely's Delight neighborhood. But the critical mass for urban success has not happened.

The Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum would be a perfect addition to Camden Yards, and a perfect complement for the Geppi and Sports Legends museums. The elements of Camden Yards are already large-scaled enough and sufficiently singular so that something as incongruous as a Chessie Monster could fit in, or rather stand out, just as intended. A whole new building could be provided on the existing parking lot between Camden Station and the Warehouse so that the vision and impact of the museum could be built-in from the ground up. Alternately, a small piece of the warehouse could be adapted to fit the museum. The gigantism of the thousand foot warehouse could be a prefect milieu for the monster - a suitable sea of architecture, so to speak, which would absorb the requisite tackiness in stride.

This would also be the important first step in the true urbanization of Camden Yards, which is urgently needed to integrate Baltimore's other present and proposed future overscaled downtown elements - the convention center, the various stadiums and arenas, and the gambling casino (see previous posts).

Voodoo Balto-nomics

The only real question is whether "Balto-nomics" has now become so warped that rational development decisions which respect urban principals cannot be made. The powers-that-be appear to have realized that making real economic development decisions involving real money just doesn't have as much of the kind of impact they want as does making giant proposals with "funny money" - a billion here for a mega-convention arena, a billion there for State Center, a couple billion more for the transit Red Line, a slice of the trillion dollar federal "stimulus money" for the Grand Prix. This is the economic witches' brew of funding sources now commonly referred to as "public-private partnerships".

With all that gigantism floating around downtown and the Inner Harbor, Ripley is just a sideshow. Harborplace was once a big deal, but now it's just soooo 1980s - Baltimore's version of Boy George's Culture Club, INXS and Duran Duran. Maybe the reason why Ripley is destined for Harborplace is a result of the old economic "trickle down theory". Harborplace has had its time at the cutting edge with top tier rents and now it's time for it's adaptive re-use for lower tier tenants like Ripley. Now Harbor East is the happnin' place. Basically, Harborplace is going through the same life-cycle as rest of Baltimore. For example, Walbrook was once an upper crust neighborhood until its former mansions were chopped up into lower income apartments, then finally boarded up, abandoned and torn down. The trickle down theory can't be repealed. It can only be acknowledged and nurtured so that the proud past can be adapted for a productive future.

The alternative is to exploit the investments made by a previous generation, such as Harborplace over three decades ago, in order to squeeze out the last bit of value. Unfortunately, that appears to be what has is happening with the proposed Ripley Odditorium in Harborplace.

Ripley must be stopped. Harborplace needs to grow old with dignity.

Downtown Racetrack

2011-10-31T10:32:00.000-04:00

A downtown racetrack:
An incredibly stupid idea that refuses to die

Google Earth image of Pimlico Racetrack superimposed over industrial community between Carroll Park (left) and Camden Yards (right), south of Ostend Street

The idea of building a downtown Baltimore horse racing track has been bandied around by the usual suspects, our so-called business leaders, for almost a decade now, so it's time to put an end to it once and for all.

It takes only a tiny bit of scrutiny to expose this as totally absurd. It's so ridiculous, it would seem to be able to just die on its own, but it keeps crawling back like a cockroach you thought was dead.

The idea was recently raised again on September 28th in the back of a front page Sun article on "Maryland's Gambling Future", by a "longtime member" of the Maryland Racing Commission, John Fanzone, who said "he hopes the Stronach involvement with the Baltimore casino improves the prospect for a downtown racetrack."

Of course, Frank Stronach has long preached for replacing the venerable historic Pimlico Racetrack, while at the same time presiding over the steady deterioration of the Maryland horse racing industry. The Sun article also reminds us that Greg Avioli, who runs Stronach's track business, says that "downtown Baltimore is a strong possibility for a new racetrack."

In order to maintain at least a shred of plausibility for this idea, proponents avoid speaking of details. But back in 2004, Maryland Stadium Authority Chairman Carl A.J. Wright said "the best spot would be on 100 acres west of Russell Street and south of Ostend Street in the vicinity of the stadiums that are home to the city's two major professional sports teams", according to an article in the Daily Record from May 13, 2005.

So I prepared a quick Google Earth image showing how 100 acres of Pimlico racetrack would look as superimposed over such a site south of Ostend Street, which can just barely be squeezed between Carroll Park to the west and the CSX mainline train tracks to the east.

One hundred acres is a huge amount of land in such an urban setting. A racetrack on such a site would absolutely dominate southwest Baltimore, and displace a huge number of present businesses as well as preclude future businesses. Quite a bit of the Pigtown residential community would also be wiped off the face of the earth.

Here is a small sample of some of what would have to be eliminated, a residential block of Cleveland Street, an historic industrial building, and the Washington Boulevard frontage on Carroll Park:

Three Pigtown places that represent a small part of the 100 acres which would have to be wiped out to accommodate a proposed racetrack.

These are exactly the kinds of places that ought to represent Baltimore at its best, and that the city should be trying to nurture and cultivate, rather than threatening with a crazy racetrack scheme. No wonder Carroll Park and Pigtown have been unable to achieve their vast potential as an urban park and community, with things like this hanging over their head.

Of course, the so-called business leaders always portray their schemes in a cloak of rationality. The Daily Record article has Donald Fry, Greater Baltimore Committee President and perennial purveyor of mega-schemes (such as the all-in-one Convention/Hotel/Arena and the multi-billion dollar transit Red Line) assuring us that while he favors a new government-sponsored racetrack, it would have to get a good return on investment - at least on paper, in the terms of one of their feasibility studies.

Somehow, these people seem to think that these schemes are the future of Baltimore - or at least downtown, or at least the part between downtown and Interstate 95 that allows people to escape without interacting with the vast rest of the city.

Wouldn't it be nice if these so-called business leaders could focus all their energies on actually improving business?

Please - once and for all - let's just kill the idea of a Pigtown Racetrack, doo-dah, doo-dah.

Hopkins Hospital North

2011-08-26T16:22:00.003-04:00

Scorched-earth renewal north of Hopkins Hospital shows the problem with mega-projects

To Hopkins Hospital and the developers, the drastic multi-billion dollar 2002 plan wasn't working well enough. In an area that was supposed to get 1500 to 2000 new housing units, market rate housing sales have been virtually nil. That's why they did a new plan.

But to the community, the "old plan" worked all too well. It has wiped out virtually everything in a swath of about 25 square blocks between Hopkins, Broadway, the Amtrak tracks and Patterson Park Avenue.

On the surface, it sounds like the same old classic conflicts of gentrification - the new and affluent pricing out the old. But this is not old-style incremental gentrification where a few bohemian pioneers move in, followed by yuppies and then finally bigtime developers. Here the big money was there from the start, with an upfront investment of hundreds of millions that have been judiciously spread around as necessary to deal with whatever and whoever stood in its path.

The fundamental problem is that the original plan did not add enough inherent new value to drive the redevelopment. The new development, basically institutional looking buildings and giant parking garages, have not lit the spark. So they've come up with a revised plan, complete with pretty pictures of the new buildings flanking green space and populated by shiny happy racially-neutral people. A decade later, that which pushes the trendy focus group-fueled buttons is somewhat different - more green space, farmers markets, and the whole livable, sustainable thing which has now entered the mainstream lexicon.

Everything and nothing changes

It's still very easy to paint this as a class conflict of rich versus poor, black versus white, and old versus new residents. But those are the same old issues which have been around for many years. The more recent question is why development has not taken off, even though most of the promises and investment were made well before the economy tanked in the past few years, and the health business has been the most recession-proof anyway.

The simple answer is that not enough new inherent value has been created. The old buildings have been demolished but the underlying urban dysfunction is still there. Being next to world-class Hopkins Hospital is simply not enough.

There is a clear lesson in this for all of Baltimore. Even the city's most absolutely attractive areas, with the most inherent value, have demanded redevelopment subsidies. Even Harbor East, located at the perfect confluence of the Inner Harbor and "gold coast", demanded subsidies. The Power Plant has demanded subsidies to attract new tenants. Harborplace is now in trouble. The Greater Baltimore Committee now cites the entire Inner Harbor and Convention Center as needing drastic new interventions to keep moving forward. Baltimoreans have been led to believe that these were our long-term success stories which were supposed to catalyze success elsewhere, but now even the helpers need help. Meanwhile, the rescue calls for Howard and Charles Street never seem to end. The Howard Street "superblock" lacks superpowers.

The loudest warning cry should be heard at State Center. Two major rail transit lines costing well over a billion dollars were supposed to be the spark to ignite "transit oriented development", and indeed two developments spurred by the state and dominated by massive parking garages (not by transit) have been built in Symphony Center and The Fitzgerald. Now the State wants to pour more billions into subsidizing a complete redevelopment.

But obviously if such subsidies are still needed after nothing has happened over the decades on its own, and State Center becomes a ghost town after the bureaucrats go home at 5 PM, the inherent value to drive development just isn't there. If it hasn't even worked around the Inner Harbor, how can it possibly work at State Center, Howard Street or Hopkins Hospital? As the opponents keep saying, massive State Center subsidies will merely drive down whatever dwindling downtown demand there might still be.

From the perspective of the poor, the great hope was supposed to be "Inclusionary Zoning". This stipulates that lower income housing must be incorporated into any new higher income project. It has been obvious to almost everyone that this makes no inherent economic sense, when it's already so difficult to build anything anyway, so a large house of economic cards has been set up around the law to try to make it work. But it hasn't.

The key is to create new added value

So what Baltimore needs is to create more inherent value - a reason to rebuild - beyond all the money being thrown at these areas. There are various aspects to this - economic, physical and social. Economically, our tax system is totally out of whack and must be fixed. Our leaders are painfully aware of this, even when they claim otherwise. This is demonstrated by the way they concoct massive subsidies, which merely bypass the onerous tax structure that otherwise kills new investment.

Socially, we must recognize that the only institutions that are working well at all are those that revolve around real communities. Yes, hopelessly dysfunctional communities such as many low income housing projects needed to be destroyed. And yes, there have been some success stories where the poor escaped from the ghetto and assimilated with yuppies in high income communities. But Baltimore's best hope is to strengthen existing communities where they still exist, because that is where people have already invested themselves.

This area north of Hopkins Hospital was once a real rowhouse neighborhood

Baltimore already has many wonderful physical assets which are not fully being taken advantage of - such as parks, institutions, geographic features and irreplaceable historic architecture. Not one of these can work alone. Even mighty Hopkins Hospital can't save its surrounding community. Historic buildings can provide the spice and the visual focus, but not all the substance. The overhypedovermatched against the surrounding tide of decay.

It's a matter of making every dollar count, making it all visible and making it work. Baltimore can't keep rebuilding what we've already built until we get it exactly right, as with the Convention Center and hotel demolition. We must use our assets as they are.

Similarly, our heavy rail subway works fairly well, but there was a huge overreaction to its limitations when light rail was built a decade later. Now with the proposed Red Line, the MTA is still overreacting and overhyping - combining the disadvantages of heavy rail (cost and overdesign) with the disadvantages of light rail (lack of connections and rider "catchment" area, and underdesign). Instead, we need to make the most of what we already have.

The city's billion dollar plan to knock down the lower Jones Falls Expressway east of Mount Vernon is another example. The JFX works fairly well as-is and the surrounding area (including the prison district) has adapted to it. Why does the city want to knock down the JFX but still insists on preserving the cancerous west side "Highway to Nowhere"?

In sum, mega-projects simply don't work. We're finally realizing that even Charles Center and the Inner Harbor, whose legacy of breathless hype we have long believed, have their limitations. And that the response to these limitations should not be yet another mega-project.

They haven't saved the rest of the city. Baltimore needs to be smarter than that.

Camden Yards

2011-08-22T17:22:00.007-04:00

Oriole Park at Camden Yards:
20 Year anniversary

The ballpark was revolutionary and the thousand foot long warehouse created a unique urban signature, but the rest of Camden Yards has still not fulfilled its potential as an urban space.

This month's Press Box magazine presents a nice twenty year retrospective of the "good old days" when Oriole Park at Camden Yards first opened. Yes, the design of Baltimore's ballpark really was as revolutionary as everyone has said. But just like the Orioles themselves, it's much nicer to remember Oriole Park's past then to contemplate its present of shrinking attendance and interest.

Camden Yards is no longer a sports leader

Let's face it: Since its 1992 opening, Baltimore has been left in the dust by many other major league cities, not just on the field but in terms of development surrounding the field. To name several, the new waterfront stadium settings in Pittsburgh and San Francisco embrace their cities' images even more than does our B&O Warehouse. And Baltimore's only major new nearby development has been the plain-Jane Hilton Hotel built by the city itself, which blocks much of the inside view, particularly of our wonderful historic Bromo Seltzer Tower. Among the others, Coors Field in Denver's LoDo neighborhood has sparked much more downtown and Platte riverfront revitalization than has Camden Yards.

Worse yet, Baltimore has since turned its back on building this kind of fine grained urban development, of the style that has demonstrated to be in complete harmony with urban ballparks as long ago as Boston's Fenway and Chicago's Wrigley built nearly a century ago. Twenty years ago, Baltimore proved it again when the high density Ridgely's Delight neighborhood continued to prosper directly across Russell Street from Oriole Park.

Baltimore started losing its way with new development when the Ravens' M&T Bank stadium was plopped down on the Camden Yards south parking lot a few years later, in the same kind of contextual vacuum that characterized 1960s-style "ashtray" stadiums built around the country such as Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. But yes, football is different from baseball, so perhaps this is excusable. Baltimore's football stadium works well enough even though no legends have grown up around it.

The proposed billion dollar convention center/arena/hotel/retail mega-complex is the present-day equivalent of the multi-purpose "ashtray" stadium monstrosities built before Oriole Park at Camden Yards revolutionized stadium design.

Look at what they're pushing now

More distressing is what has been happening lately, with the Greater Baltimore Committee pushing their massive billion dollar combination arena, convention center, hotel, retail complex between Camden Yards and the Inner Harbor. This proposed mega-complex is so hopelessly way out of scale with everything around it, just like the proverbial million pound gorilla which promises to eat up everything in sight. This is a suburban fortress mentality. It's easy to compare such a facility to those 1960s-style combination baseball-football "ash tray" stadiums that were the bane of sports until Oriole Park came along.

It's also easy to detect the city's increasing desperation, in its efforts to build a slots casino just south of Camden Yards, no matter what kind of monstrosity might ultimately be proposed. Recently, city leaders have been banking more and more of the city's economic future on the slots project.

When you want a casino in the worst way, that's probably what you're going to get - the worst way. It looks increasingly like the city will not be able to say "no" to any design demand or shortcut proposed by a prospective slots developer. It cold easily end up as just another alien mega-barn plopped down south of the football stadium, built to maximize immediate payoffs and minimize costs, rather than being an element that will intelligently fit into a plan for urbanizing the entire area around Camden Yards.

Just look at the way the city has allowed the Grand Prix preparation to run roughshod over the Inner Harbor's streets and trees in preparing for the Labor Day weekend race, and that is a hint at how future plans promise to be dealt with.

Another recent proposal is for a branch of "Seacrets", a six acre mega-bar from Ocean City that has been talking to Westport developer Patrick Turner. Seacrets could become either a wonderful and compatible urban attraction, or just another loud, tacky community disruption. It's a strong signal of danger that a recent front page Sun article on Seacrets cited Westport, where it would be very difficult to assimilate into Turner's plan which has already won neighborhood approval, but did not mention the Gateway South casino area. Seacrets could certainly fit in better near the casino, if not for all the unspoken promises the city should be expected to make to the casino developer.

As the hype of economic justification of mega-projects because more and more convoluted and strident, without firm numbers of course, the future looks increasingly at risk.

A concept plan to urbanize Camden Yards prepared in 2010 for an article in BaltimoreBrew.com with new development on parking lots and air rights oriented around a new urban street.

Promoting true urbanization

This type of development desperation is needless. A casino, an arena, a convention center expansion, new hotels and other new urban development and amenities can easily be accommodated as part of a plan that integrates them into downtown and the city, and allows the entire private sector, large and small businesses alike, to maximize opportunities on an equal footing.

Camden Yards' expansive parking lots and highway and railroad "air rights" have tremendous potential for new development that could enable Baltimore to retake the leadership away from Pittsburgh, Denver, San Francisco and other cities as the best possible stadium environment. Furthermore, Gateway South and Westport, the areas south of Camden Yards along the Middle Branch waterfront, also have tremendous potential if the city doesn't blow it.

One of the impressions of the PressBox article is that stadium architect HOK breezed into Baltimore back in the 1980s and immediately presented its vision for what became Oriole Park at Camden Yards, dazzling everyone with its brilliance. But in reality, HOK had been architects for many of those "ashtray" stadiums built around the country, and they originally tried to sell the same thing to Baltimore.

But making Camden Yards a unique and valuable part of Baltimore was a local effort, not HOK's. This kind of local initiative is still needed now more than ever to ensure that Camden Yards, downtown, the Inner Harbor, Gateway South, Westport, and indeed the entire city is planned in a way that allows it to freely grow and prosper instead of merely catering to those who make demands on our will and resources.

North Avenue

2011-08-20T17:06:00.001-04:00

Coppin campus planners weren't dumb. They put a pedestrian bridge over North Avenue even though urban designers hate those things. They didn't want to deal with the typical squalid, boarded-up failures of North Avenue

The key to fixing North Avenue:

De-emphasize it

Lou Fields, head of the African American Tourism Council of Maryland, wants to spearhead a revitalization movement for North Avenue, Baltimore's widest, straightest, most continuous and most troubled east-west artery, as chronicled in yesterday's Sun.

But he's way off-base in suggesting Pratt Street as role model. Pratt is the city's very prominent "front door" which for decades has continuously received millions in taxpayer funds for such incongruous elements as pedestrian streetscapes, 180 mph Grand Prix racers and subsidized new development. Despite such conflicts, Pratt Street still has a strong positive image, which is why it continues to be the "go to" street for events such as parades, the Grand Prix, the proposed billion dollar convention center expansion and many other costly efforts.

The main reason Pratt Street is kept up is because the city has to. North Avenue couldn't possibly maintain that kind of prominence, which is just as well.

The painful lessons from Howard Street

A better but cautionary example for North Avenue is Howard Street, which was once a great street and has also received hundreds of millions in public funds, but continues to languish without a positive image or new momentum. Howard Street now has light rail, Camden Yards, the new convention center hotel, the retail Superblock and State Center, while North Avenue has the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, Coppin State University, Station North Arts Cafe and Joe Squared Pizza, but neither street has any potent unifying elements.

Howard, a north-south street, has failed because what it desperately needs is strong east-west lateral linkages from the heart of downtown and Mount Vernon into the west side. The 1960s development of Charles Center and the Civic Center (now First Mariner Arena) was the first nail in the coffin, cutting off the downtown vitality of Redwood and Lexington Streets. Further north, Howard Street was harmed by the destruction of the urban grid to build State Center, Baltimore Life Insurance (now Symphony Center), MLK Boulevard's north terminus and what became the site of the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The new State Center mega-plan would promise to create even more problems by making Howard a physical continuation of MLK Boulevard's oppressive traffic flow.

If all the money, energy and hype that has been lavished on Howard Street over the past four decades hasn't worked, what hope is there for North Avenue?

Believe it or not, that's North Avenue in the background, right around the corner from these elegant Mount Royal Terrace townhouses in Reservoir Hill. Residents try to forget North Avenue is there, so there is virtually no mutual benefit.

De-emphasize North Avenue

North Avenue has been similarly abused. It is the official designated truck route away from downtown and the waterfront, but it provides very little unity between its adjacent neighborhoods such as Station North to Charles Village, Bolton Hill to Reservoir Hill, Upton to Mondawmin, Rosemont to Walbrook, or Oliver to Midway. Where revitalization has happened, it has happened in spite of North Avenue, not because of it.

The lesson for North Avenue should be clear: The key to revitalization is not to promote North Avenue, but to de-emphasize it in favor of the communities which surround it. The long slow revitalization of Reservoir Hill would benefit greatly by drastically narrowing adjacent North Avenue to minimize the physical and psychological gap between Reservoir and Bolton Hill. This segment of North Avenue was widened about four decades ago while the street oriented buildings, which might have been the beneficiaries of any redevelopment, were demolished. It was a classic example of destroying the village to save it. This section of North Avenue could easily be narrowed from nearly 100 feet to about 50 feet while still accommodating all the traffic.

Pennsylvania Avenue and Charles Street, which have also had some modest success at creating positive identities for themselves, could undergo similar plans. North Avenue has been widened over the years at both locations, and re-narrowing would be an opportunity to promote the lateral redevelopment of these communities which have suffered greatly because of their proximity to North Avenue.

The oppressive traffic on North Avenue is a severe burden, and the traffic isn't going anywhere. This limits the ability of North Avenue itself to be the linchpin for any revitalization, but it should not prevent surrounding community efforts from succeeding.

Another major problem is the longstanding emphasis on commercial uses. Commercial is usually the last step in revitalization, and the first step in deterioration. Great communities are needed first. It has taken many decades for Station North to achieve its modest commercial success, and this has only finally started to come with association to the Charles Street communities, Penn Station, Maryland Institute - and anything else except North Avenue itself. When businesses locate on North Avenue, they don't emphasize their association with North Avenue.

The section of North Avenue between Bolton and Reservoir Hills has lots of parking and is plenty "clean and green", to use former Mayor Dixon's catchphrase (as the Sun did). But Madison Park North very harmfully cuts off these two communities from each other along the wide swath of North Avenue.

A roundabout solution

Traffic roundabouts are a unique tool which could be used in this effort. Unlike most "traffic calming" measures, a properly designed roundabout is capable of handling huge volumes of traffic. Roundabouts also have the unique ability to dis-orient perceptions away from major streets, and promote the "sense of place" of the roundabout location itself. Despite the fact that traffic and pedestrian conflicts at roundabouts remain formidable, these locations become landmarks that reflect on the surrounding communities. As such, roundabouts create great focal points for art, statues, and other unique urban design elements. Washington DC's traffic circles such as DuPont Circle have become fashionable community names, in spite of the nasty traffic challenges, and the Towson Circle has had a similar effect in spite of (or maybe because of) its notoriety.

Fulton Avenue, Eutaw Place, Broadway and Belair Road/Gay Street could be prime candidates for roundabouts along North Avenue.

In sum, streets are how we see the city, but it is communities which allow the city to grow and prosper. North Avenue, like Howard Street, is not a good "vehicle" for revitalization. The current vision exercise for North Avenue needs to realize that the more North Avenue itself can be downplayed, the better off its surrounding communities will be.

Grand Prix

2011-08-02T14:19:00.009-04:00

Despite Grand Prix glorification,
Baltimoreans are NOT adrenaline junkies

This is what the Inner Harbor will look like in a few weeks, as all the frantic preparation of the past year finally comes to culmination - Planners talk about "livability" and "sustainability", then give us 180 mph race cars. And that's just the latest in what they want.

This city's sad plight seems to boil down to one thing. Our civic leaders seem to think we're all a bunch of adrenaline junkies. Most of the crazy schemes they've concocted to "save the city" are based on their assumption that the citizenry needs ever increasing jolts of stimulation to keep us going.

Like most misconceptions, this one is rooted in points which really are true. Yes, Baltimore is the source of most of the themes, focus and energy that drive the surrounding region. But when visitors and suburbanites swoop into the city for some action, it's increasingly manufactured action, not something inherent. And most city residents have grown weary of it. So much so that hundreds of thousands have fled the urban zoo in their quest for some normalcy.

Michael Dresser's column in yesterday's Sun is the most recent summation: "When there's a need for a shot of adrenaline, Baltimore is the place to find it." So the city gets subjected to "special events" like the upcoming Baltimore Grand Prix, which is merely the latest in a long series of grand cataclysms, some of which are very nice and temporary, like Artscape and other city fairs, some of which were promised to be temporary and turned permanent, like mass total destruction for the "Highway to Nowhere", and a whole range in between like the Charles Center and Old Town projects.

Dresser says the alternative is "doing nothing", by which he means "fading into the third tier of American cities." He then admonishes, "If you're really a city person - whether full-time or on weekends - the traffic problems caused by special events are more a challenge to be surmounted than an ordeal to be endured."

Wrong. City residents do not crave challenges. Real Baltimoreans love the calm moments we get when the invading crazies are no longer around, when all the visitors and suburbanites have gone home.

Yes, real Baltimoreans are also amused when we are able to witness and attend all these big events without getting into the fray induced by the visitors and suburbanites. Bolton Hill, Mount Vernon and Midtown residents get real pleasure when they are able to attend Artscape just by walking down the street instead of getting into the gigantic traffic-frayed hassles among suburbanites and other visitors.

The perception of city residents amid Baltimore visitors and suburbanites is similar to the perception of wild animals among national park visitors. Artscape and the Grand Prix are not our natural habitat any more than Yellowstone campgrounds are the natural habitat of wild bears. So it's no wonder when these things drive us neurotic, just as bears like Yogi are taunted with pic-a-nic baskets.

City residents are no different from suburbanites, in that we want our lives to be a mixture or excitement and calm, even boredom. We also want it all on our own terms, not like the Grand Prix invasion foisted on our native habitat, or the city officials who announce that a neighborhood needs to be destroyed to be saved.

Boredom and conformity are actually a Baltimore tradition. We're a city of rowhouses. Suburban houses are often accused of looking alike, but not nearly as much as Baltimore rowhouses. It's soothing. Similarly, mass transit was once a calm, drama-free way to get around, but nowadays it often doesn't go where we need to go, if it works at all. Dresser speaks of mass transit as part of city residents' challenges and opportunities. It's not supposed to be that way. Mass transit is just supposed to be a support system for a calm urban life.

Overstimulation beyond the Grand Prix

Most of the "big ideas" that have been pushed upon Baltimore by our civic leaders have not delivered the level of success promised in their hype. Billions of dollars later, we still don't have a decent transit system, Howard Street is still in shambles, the "Highway to Nowhere" is a wasteland, and the city as a whole is still an economic basket case with thousands of abandoned houses.

But the Inner Harbor is a success, right? All those gleaming buildings surrounding it are surely a result of brilliant planning, right?

Well... the focal point of the Inner Harbor is the water itself. The water hasn't changed much. It may be a bit cleaner, yes, but not enough to really change anything.

The real reason for the Inner Harbor's success amid of all of Baltimore's failure is that the water itself is a large reservoir of calm that resists change. The gleaming new buildings around the waterfront and its promenade cling to the water like a baby clings to mama. Baltimore's harbor is that unique place that has the ability to absorb massive change while staying rooted in the stability that the water provides.

So our civic leaders keep pushing more and more massive change upon this watery vessel of stability. Despite the fact that the Inner Harbor has already been given far more attention, far more renewal and far more investment than any other part of Baltimore, our leaders keep doubling down for more.

The Grand Prix is but the latest tip of the iceberg. Despite the fact that the entire city needs better mass transit, they want to build the multi-billion dollar Red Line right along the waterfront. (Yes, they also want to put it in the median strip of the "Highway to Nowhere", not to renew it, but only to contain it. If they really wanted to renew the corridor, they'd get rid of the highway.)

Incredulously, the Greater Baltimore Committee now concludes that the Inner Harbor, one of the few places in Baltimore where renewal has actually been reputed to be a real sustainable success, is in need of a whole new round of renewal to the tune of another billion dollars plus. So among other things, they want to knock down a large part of the Convention Center and the adjacent Sheraton Hotel for a billion dollar expansion with an arena.

And they're putting it in terms of jacking up our urban adrenaline.

So the cataclysms created in the name of the Baltimore Grand Prix are a mere prologue for what our civic leaders now have in store for us. And they've co-opted that ode to adrenaline gone wild, Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run", as the soundtrack for their sales pitch. The Greater Baltimore Committee has presented the following seven minute video vision of a brave new Inner Harbor to the strains of The Boss:

"Baby this town rips the bones from your back,

It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap,

We gotta get out while we're young,

'Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run..."

As incongruous as is Springsteen's message of impending death and escape, fueled by a "runaway American dream", it is actually shared by the hundreds of thousands of residents who have indeed escaped Baltimore. And it is actually consistent with the city's unstated but all-too-prevalent promotion of high-stakes urban redevelopment as an adrenaline high.

Michael Dresser's rhetoric that the only alternative is a post-industrial wasteland like Youngstown, Ohio is only slightly more overstated than the sales tactics of our civic leaders.

Let's get real economic development

Baltimore is a great city. It is the largest city in the richest state in the world's richest nation, with inherent geographic assets like proximity to the wonderful harbor directly between our nation's capital to the south and the world's economic capital, New York City, just to the north.

Baltimoreans are sick and tired of the emotional hard-sell tactics of our so-called leaders, trying to foist their mega-projects on us like spoiled children looking for their next toy. Recall that taxpayers only recently relented and let them build the Hilton convention hotel with our precious money, while they didn't say a word about their next billion dollar "I wanna-wanna".

All we want is real economic development - a city that works, as a whole, so we can calm down and get some peace for a change.

Power of Home

2011-07-31T14:34:00.101-04:00

Baltimore's untapped strategy:
The power of HOME

Two homes hanging on, next to two boarded-up wrecks. This might be a result of bad planning, but the residents can cope anyway, invoking the "power of home".

Many people won't touch Baltimore with a ten mile pole. Many others cling to their personal comfort zone, wherever in the city that might be. Meanwhile, our city leaders seem to be intent to constantly pour more and more money into a few key high-visibility institutions like the Convention Center, Inner Harbor and Howard Street retail district until they finally get them right, which they insist are "critical" to saving Baltimore, while claiming their diversion of attention from elsewhere is only temporary.

When something terrible happens, like the recent Fourth of July violence in the Inner Harbor, municipal apologists like the Sun claim it is just a slight blip on the statistical radar. As if there aren't enough decades of solid statistics to prove that something is seriously wrong with the trends of Baltimore's population, economy, abandoned housing and school drop-out rates. Crime is but the tip of an iceberg.

But Baltimore still somehow has plenty of beautifully maintained houses, even next to some in chronic decay, regardless of whether they happen to be part of a government "program". There are still plenty of Baltimoreans who have learned the secret of survival amid the chaos.

Home versus escape

The case of Jasmine Hogan is very instructive. She recently presented her story in the Sun on the page opposite one of their tiresome crime editorials. Ms. Hogan has the privilege to attend and graduate from Peabody Conservatory, one of Baltimore's institutional jewels. But she described herself as a "prisoner of the city" and downtown as her "urban prison". She resented her encounters with Baltimore's natives and was "eat-my-teeth-out jealous" of her classmates who escaped from the prison for the summer. Not the kind of language city leaders would want to hear.

Maybe it's a Baltimore version of the Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe like Patty "Tanya" Hearst, she began to identify with those she felt had imprisoned her. But instead of fighting the city in which she felt imprisoned, she finally embraced it. As Ms. Hogan says:

"...I started walking everywhere. From downtown (my urban 'prison') to Federal Hill, Patterson Park, Fells Point, Station North, Charles Village and many more neighborhoods. I began to see my summer adventures as mini-destination traveling."

And she saw the same people she had previously resented, but now she learned to "understand the vibe of each mini-galaxy, in the now not-so-small universe of Baltimore."

Our city leaders could learn from Ms. Hogan

Our city leaders have been acting in the same kind of confined "urban prison" that Jasmine Hogan did, before her epiphany. Our leaders look at our perfectly nice downtown convention center and hotels, into which they have already poured more and more money over the past three decades, claiming each expansion would finally make it successful, and now they still want to spend a billion dollars more. Our leaders look at the Inner Harbor, long lauded as Baltimore's catalyst for rebirth, and now they want to change it from a civic space to a theme park. They also want to take the rest of the waterfront eastward to Fells Point and Canton, already renewed, and add a multi-billion dollar rail transit line hugging the shoreline while the rest of the city's transit system languishes in neglect. The city's other transit answer is to spend precious city tax dollars to run their free Charm City Circulator in an area that already has MTA bus service provided by the state.

Just as Jasmine Hogan got beyond her original attraction to Baltimore focused only on the Peabody Conservatory, our city leaders must get beyond their own limited views of what constitutes Baltimore. There are hundreds of thousands of Baltimoreans who have dedicated their lives to their own "mini galaxy", and our leaders have let them down by not considering the city as a whole.

If its not the Stockholm Syndrome, maybe its the Lake Woebegone Syndrome. We all like to think that our own children or our own neighborhoods is "above average". That's a powerful thought. It's the power to allow us to believe that our own neighborhood is safe, even while the rest of the city is going to hell in a handcart.

City surveys have borne this out. In an October 16, 2009 editorial, the Sun quotes a survey that states that 93% of all city residents feel safe or very safe in their own neighborhood during the day, and 68% at night, but 87% also felt that violent crime is a serious problem in the city as a whole. They feel that problems are worse elsewhere in the city than in their own home base. This still causes angst. Nearly 40% felt likely to move out of the city soon.

That parallels how our so-called leaders seem to feel about it. They share the same human nature to feel more comfortable in their own universe than in someone else's, no matter what it is. Our city leaders want to upgrade the convention center yet again simply because that's their universe. It's what they know. When they stray outside of it, they're like bulls in a china shop, such as in the scorched earth approach to renewal north of Hopkins Hospital or the $475,000 rehabs in otherwise burnt-out sections of Johnston Square.

Yes, tourism has become big business in Baltimore, but that's just because so many other economic sectors have become gutted.

Our leaders simply don't put themselves in a position to consider roles in the city as a whole. Yes, the Inner Harbor is important. It's our front yard. But it's far more important as an integral piece of our urban geography than as this-or-that attraction or retail establishment. Looking at the whole city, the Inner Harbor is Baltimore's fulcrum - the place you go to get from east to west, north to south, or (even more so) from southeast to south. And it's wide open - a stunning contrast to its urban surroundings. That should dictate what it needs. The waterfront promenade has been a fantastic success because it embraces its geography. Literally. Unlike a Ferris Wheel. And creating a successful bikeway and transit-way would work with the geography the same way, taking advantage of the spaciousness of the waterfront rather than being plagued by driveway conflicts as is the bikeway, or expensively and redundantly buried underground as the Red Line is proposed.

The "power of home" is the antidote to angst and adrenaline

Baltimoreans who love the city do so simply because it's our home. It took awhile for Jasmine Hogan, but she came around. It's an acquired taste. Many thousands of others are driven out or under by social, economic or emotional needs, before they can finally feel comfortable. It's a different home for each of us, and some people never find it.

Of course, a few of us are eccentric rich folks who can buy their way to personal urban fulfillment, like Stephen King buying up Ritz Carlton waterfront penthouses. Unfortunately, some of those with access to big money are spending OUR money on convention centers, subways, etc. They're always looking for that next mega-project to try to transform Baltimore into something it isn't, never was, and never will be.

Let's just make Baltimore a city that works, so that each of us can be free to find our own home in a way that works for us.

Old Town

2011-06-17T09:12:00.003-04:00

How to fix Old Town

Old Town is perfectly poised to be the neighborhood to bring out the most urbanely scaled side of the Hopkins Hospital campus. The key is to extend McElderry Street (shown in yellow) from the foot of the iconic Hopkins Dome Building (background) to the center of Old Town at Gay Street (foreground), then continue it westward to Mount Vernon and Downtown.

Old Town is currently one of Baltimore's saddest and most forsaken neighborhoods. It is most infamous as the scene of a 1968 race riot, then was completely rebuilt to much fanfare in the mid-'70s. But almost as quickly, it started to deteriorate again, until by now it has suffered far more damage and abandonment than was ever inflicted by the riot.

Old Town is bounded roughly by the Jones Falls Expressway (JFX) on the west, Orleans Street to the south, Caroline Street to the east and Monument Street to the north. It is mostly vacant lots, vacant buildings, and parking lots.

Old Town's biggest problem has been an intense obsession with the negative - proximity to the JFX expressway overpass to the west and the prison district to the north - which seem to have completely blinded people to the area's strengths which should be far more obvious than they apparently are.

But the prisons aren't going away. And the city's proposed JFX "solution" is a billion dollar project to knock down the overpass and convert it to a surface boulevard that, aside from its prohibitive cost and nebulous time frame, would make it far more of a traffic obstacle than it is now and would cause severe traffic spillovers.

Stirling Street in Old Town looking south toward Downtown

Old Town's squandered assets

The most obvious asset is its uniquely centralized location at the crossing point of the city's primary north-south (I-83) and east-west (US 40) thoroughfares. Why has it become so trendy to sulk about being located next to major highways rather than reaping the benefits?

Old Town's second major asset is the tenacity of the Stirling Street residents, occupants of Baltimore's original dollar historic homesteading houses which still look at lovely as ever. While virtually everything around them has crumbled, Stirling Street has held on, a testament to the power of historic preservation. They stand ready to serve as anchor and role model for all the needed redevelopment around them. Despite all the dishevelment, there are still many other distinctive historic buildings still standing, if only just barely.

The rear of Old Town Mall from what was formerly Somerset Homes, along the spine of what could be the McElderry Street extension from Hopkins Hospital.

But the game-changing impetus to finally get Old Town moving forward should be the recent demolition of the Somerset Homes low income projects in the blocks between Central and Caroline Streets. This demolition has made Old Town's eastward proximity to the gigantic Hopkins Hospital campus, the nation's top rated medical institution, almost palpable.

McElderry looking east toward the Hopkins Dome from near Central Avenue. Dunbar Middle School is on the right.

Making the most of Johns Hopkins

Best of all, Old Town is oriented to the most attractive side of the huge Johns Hopkins campus. In the other three directions, Hopkins' periphery is lined mostly with parking garages, blank walls, loading docks and the like. To the south, the renovated Butchers Hill and Washington Hill neighborhoods have succeeded mostly by turning their backs to Hopkins as much as Hopkins has turned its back to them. To the east, periodic attempts to remake the Monument Market and business district have had lackluster results. And most famously to the north, things got so bad that virtually the entire neighborhood was leveled to the ground to be rebuilt as a biotech park.

The key to inextricably linking Old Town with the very best of Hopkins is McElderry Street, which extends westward from the iconic and historic Johns Hopkins Dome building toward Old Town. McElderry Street is oriented to the Hopkins Dome building the same way downtown Annapolis is oriented to the Maryland State House, which hovers over the radiating streets of Annapolis like a grand sentinel. Or for a somewhat exaggerated comparison, think of how the U.S. Capitol looks out over Pennsylvania Avenue or the Philadelphia Museum of Art looks out over the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (but without Rocky Balboa).

Starting here at the east end of McElderry Street at Broadway, a whole new memorable ceremonial avenue can be built all the way through Old Town to the Jones Falls Expressway, about three-fourths of a mile. At the east end would be the Hopkins Dome Building. To the west would be the Jones Falls and Centre Street through the Mount Vernon neighborhood and downtown.

The Johns Hopkins medical complex needs such a grand formal gateway and downtown linkage, befitting its status as a world class institution and Baltimore's leading employer, even more than Old Town does. Johns Hopkins is as image-conscious as any modern hospital, but even their massive demolition and rebuilding program has not created such a top quality environment.

Even the city pouring millions into the reconstruction of Orleans Street as a tree-lined boulevard has not done the trick, because of its heavy through traffic and parking garages. While Orleans is an asset for accommodating traffic, McElderry has the distinct advantage of having the Hopkins Dome building as its culmination, meaning it would continue to carry virtually no through traffic. It could and should also be a lively pedestrian dominated environment, with direct access to the Hopkins Metro station.

Looking west from Hopkins Hospital campus along a McElderry extension (yellow) toward Old Town and Downtown

Making the Dome the focal point

Here is how McElderry Street can be transformed into the grand ceremonial parkway linking Hopkins Hospital, Old Town, Mount Vernon and Downtown.

The third block between Caroline and Central has the distinctively classic gothic Dunbar Middle School. The school should be framed by the street, but it has been converted to a makeshift parking lot, which fortunately can easily be undone and made back into a street again.

Looking east toward the Hopkins Dome from Aisquith Street, past the low-rise NAF Prep School. The Dunbar Middle School is behind to the right.

There is one building blocking the reconnection of the street just east of Central Avenue, the NAF Prep School. (Please accept my apologies if I've gotten any school names wrong; they seem to change even more quickly than banks.) However, there are almost unlimited options for rebuilding this school nearby so that McElderry Street can be reconnected.

At the Old Town Mall, a slight southward shift can take the street all the way to the Jones Falls Expressway at Centre Street. A few more buildings would need to be knocked down to get there, but any valuable ones should be bypassable with an appropriate zig or zag. Centre Street has its own iconic view of the Washington Monument at Charles Street, which would make a nice western bookend to the commanding view of the Hopkins Dome at the east end.

In the long term, if the expressway is ever knocked down, this new street could be hooked up to the south end of the JFX. In such a case, the parkway could be made into an important link to help disperse the expressway traffic onto Orleans, Central, and Caroline, instead of overloading President Street as it otherwise does.

Proposed McElderry extension looking east toward the Hopkins Dome from Old Town west of Central Avenue. The new building drawn at left just across Central could be the new NAF Prep School.

Putting Old Town on the map

A McElderry Street extension can finally give Old Town a workable context and theme for redevelopment. Many reasons have been given for Old Town's past failure. Even though it is at one of the main crossroads of the entire city between the JFX and Orleans Street (US 40), it doesn't particularly relate to anything. The emphasis on retail at Old Town Mall was particularly difficult. Pedestrian malls have long gone out of fashion, especially when crime can be perceived as an issue. Retail always seemed to be a crapshoot in Baltimore. Retail markets are fickle. Places like Howard/Lexington and Belvedere Square have had multiple rebirths. If something isn't right, stores can pack up and leave at a moment's notice. And they do.

In contrast, the historic houses on Stirling Street, just behind Old Town Mall, still look just as good as they ever have. The original homesteaders and their successors have tenaciously stood their ground in the face of the abandonment and devastation around them. Property values have suffered, leaving nothing to build upon, but the community has held on, and would ideally benefit from Old Town's new key position between the Jones Falls and Hopkins Hospital.

Empty Old Town Mall (Gay Street) on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Gay Street obviously needs to be unmalled and reopened to local traffic. Urban designers love unlimited ground floor retail but they need to get real, since Baltimore is littered with failed ground floor retail. And "big box" retail may be just as bad a bet in the long run. Most of the historic buildings on the Gay Street Mall have a significant amount of floor space on upper floors so office development should be a major part of the mix, with space that can appeal to prospective tenants looking for something distinctive, a perfect compliment to the sterile modern environment of the new EBDI Biotech Park. The new McElderry parkway would wrap around the rear of some of the largest buildings, which would have great views looking eastward directly onto the axis of the Hopkins Dome.

Real estate marketers should be the ones to determine just who can be enticed to a new reinvented Old Town. It does not necessarily have to be limited to healthcare or biotech types. It only needs to be people who recognize that modern Baltimore largely revolves around Johns Hopkins, which should be just about anybody.

Having the iconic Hopkins Dome building presiding over Old Town would give both the prominence they deserve.

Franklin-Mulberry Gateway

2011-04-18T21:52:00.002-04:00

Here are some more Google Earth images showing how the interchange of the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway and MLK Boulevard should be downsized and transformed into a new gateway between Downtown and West Baltimore, with the Heritage Crossing community and the Metro West Social Security complex as the linchpins.

Read the whole story at The Baltimore Brew:

The Franklin-Mulberry Expressway is shown downsized to a single overpass over MLK Boulevard, to expand Heritage Crossing.

The "plan view" shows the new roads in yellow. The new east-west street is Franklin Street, relocated as a neighborhood street. The north-south street is an extension of Pine Street from the University of Maryland campus (toward the south, bottom) to Heritage Crossing (to the north, top, at the end of the "hook"). To the east (right end) is a new connector from Franklin Street onto the downsized expressway.

This drawing eliminates the direct connector road between Heritage Crossing, MLK Boulevard and Pine Street. I then realized a better solution if it is feared such a link would attract too much traffic would be to design the MLK median opening so that only bikes and pedestrians can use it.

Looking west from downtown.

Looking north from the University of Maryland.

Heritage Crossing looks like it's a downtown neighborhood, with the Social Security tower as a pleasant backdrop...

But the "highway to nowhere" and MLK Boulevard underneath it stand rudely in the way. That expressway overpass needs to go, and new urban "people places" put in its place.

Red Line from the Brew

2011-01-28T07:34:00.000-05:00

This April '10 Baltimore Brew story, which was written as the MTA was jacking up its Red Line cost and ridership projections yet again, shows what a house-of-cards it is. Construction funding has now been put off indefinitely - at least until well after our current Governor, a champion of the project, is out of office.

MTA manipulates the future again to sell its Baltimore Red Line

Gerald Neily April 30, 2010 at 12:42 pm Story Link View Comments

The Red Line will be a hard sell at the First Mariner tower in Canton, where folks are accustomed to ample parking

Text and photos by GERALD NEILY

Last year, the Maryland Transit Administration cut its proposed Red Line tunnel under Cooks Lane down to a single reversible track to make the project more “cost-effective.” The image of two trains speeding toward each other on a single track and doing a do-si-do at the last minute did not go over well. Yesterday, the MTA’s Henry Kay said in The Baltimore Sun, “Having the two tracks would increase the reliability and it also would be more cost-effective.”

What makes the Red Line appear cost-effective are their wishful-thinking guesstimates of future “transit-oriented-development.” Without the most important requirement for a cost-effective transit project — a design that integrates it into the system as a whole — you end up with under-utilized transit and “transit-oriented-developments” populated by people who never get out of their cars.

It all boils down to the MTA’s bizarro math. They juiced the ridership projection upward by 28% last year in order to reach the federal cost-effectiveness standard. The need to meet the standard is also the reason they reduced the tunnel to a single track. Yesterday, they announced ridership numbers that have been bumped up by another 14% over the original projection. This allowed them enough of a cushion to restore some of the other accoutrements that one would expect on a modern transit line . . . like a track in each direction.

In addition to deciding that two tracks are a good idea after all, the MTA has also now decided to provide full safety signalization, along with an underground crossover track which can actually be driven at faster than walking speed, yard and shop improvements and enough vehicles to allow for more spares, driving the cost up to $1.8 billion.

None of these changes, in themselves, added more riders to their projection. They merely restored things that are normally taken for granted in transit. But the MTA waited until they could juice the ridership before they agreed to provide them.

The new ridership projection is based on yet another revised population and employment estimate for twenty years into the future, and on the assumption that the new development to fulfill these numbers will be “transit-oriented.” That is, users of the new development will rely on the Red Line as a primary source of access.

Proposed west terminus of Red Line at the federal medicare “fortress” which would be totally disoriented from transit for security reasons

Transit-Oriented-Development flops

Until now, transit-oriented-development has been a spectacular failure in Baltimore, even while other cities have achieved significant success. This failure is well documented on Howard Street, once considered the linchpin of the city’s transit system. But elsewhere as well, in the Baltimore region, new development has been almost inversely related to transit proximity.

Owings Mills has boomed everywhere except near the Metro station. Canton, Fells Point, Key Highway and Locust Point — all with poor-to-non-existent bus service — have also boomed. Legg Mason has moved out of the tallest building in town, at the confluence of the transit system, to a Harbor East waterfront promontory. The landlord of that soon to be largely vacant building has built yet another large new parking garage on Lombard Street to try to attract new office tenants.

Alleged transit-oriented Symphony Center on Howard Street – dominated by its huge parking garage.

The MTA’s whole idea with the Red Line is to avoid relying on integration with the transit system as a whole to attract the necessary riders, and rely on future transit-oriented-development instead. That is why their Red Line hugs the waterfront instead of being built inland where it can be fed by the entire transit system. That is why it stays two blocks away from the existing subway at Charles Center. That is also why it stays in a single corridor in West Baltimore, where it is geographically isolated from potential feeder bus routes.

If you build it, will they come?

Transit-oriented-development relies on circular reasoning. Development will be attracted because of the transit line, and users will use it because that is why they located there. But the southeast leg of the Red Line has already been developed in an almost totally auto-oriented manner.

The new First Mariner tower in Canton and Morgan Stanley building in Fells Point have been built with large surface parking lots. These parking lots are presumed to be future development sites, but once users are oriented to their cars, history tells us they will not move over to transit. Other new buildings may look transit-oriented, but that is only because designers have become more adept at hiding their massive parking garages. Occupants may someday switch to 50 mpg hybrid cars in response to $5 gas, but transit would require an implausibly sudden lifestyle change which the isolation of the Red Line would not facilitate.

Back in the Day

Transit planning was not always done this way. Back in the mid 1970s, the ridership projection for the original eight-mile subway line to Reisterstown Plaza was based on what the MTAMondawmin and other stations) along with large parking lots that would attract patrons from a large surrounding area and “kiss and ride” access from spouses driving each other to the station. This lifestyle never caught on.

Back then, future transit-oriented-development was being planned for the large parking lots, but it was not relied upon for the ridership numbers. The line was promised to be cost-effective as soon as it opened and not off in some vaguely promised era, twenty years in the future. That proved to be prudent, as transit-oriented-development has still not materialized. At Mondawmin, a brand new supermarket and Target big box store still totally turn their backs to the transit station. At State Center, a grandiose new plan is still on the drawing board, and activity on Howard Street has been in reverse mode for the past thirty years.

So the MTA promised 83,000 riders a day for its first eight-mile line in its first year, and another 16,000 riders upon completion of a short extension to Milford Mill and Old Court (for a total of about 100,000). But three decades later, the ridership currently still hovers around 47,000, even after the completion of additional extensions to Owings Mills and Hopkins Hospital, as well as a light rail system that it almost but does not quite connect with.

Learning from the MTA’s Mistakes

The biggest mistake made by the MTA, then and now, is not planning transit lines that are integrated into the system as a whole.

The fatal flaw of the existing subway is that it has no feeder terminal on its east end. At its Hopkins Hospital terminus, a feeder hub was originally planned and was the basis of the justification for the ridership numbers that got federal approval, but then it was scrapped, and there has been virtually no coordination between the Metro and bus systems ever since. So the #5 bus line must chug along a parallel route to the Metro from Hopkins Hospital to Mondawmin along surface streets that can take up to 50 minutes — meanwhile the subway can do it in 12 minutes. Overall, the MTA’s rail system has taken very few buses off our surface streets.

So the MTA has largely given up on integration, in favor of promises of future development. They want to build a Red Line that hugs the waterfront and stays two blocks from the existing subway instead of tying the system together, and they want to rely on new possible transit-oriented-development in an area that is already close to its full auto-oriented build-out, instead of trying to fix their dysfunctional system to attract riders. Transit-oriented-development needs a true transit system.

Fort McHenry Promenade

2011-01-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of talk lately in Baltimore about creating more vibrant parks. The key to vibrant parks is creating vibrant street edges, and one of the best opportunities to do that is along Fort Avenue between the Inner Harbor and Fort McHenry. From my June '09 story in the Baltimore Brew, here's how:

Oh say, can you extend the Inner Harbor promenade to Fort McHenry?

Gerald Neily June 4, 2009 at 7:32 am Story Link View Comments

By GERALD NEILY

Fort McHenry is on a peninsula, but it might as well be an island. Baltimore’s most important and enduring tourist attraction, the birthplace of our national anthem, is also its most isolated. When befuddled tourists discover they can’t get there by following the Inner Harbor waterfront promenade, many just give up.

But extending the promenade to Fort McHenry should be much easier than anyone has imagined. Unlike some of the more out-there proposals for spiffing up the city (gondolas over the Inner Harbor, knocking down the Jones Falls Expressway, turning a century-old derelict railroad bridge into the centerpiece of walking trail to a developer’s upscale develoment) this promenade idea would face few political or physical impediments, isn’t horribly expensive and could actually happen quickly. It should be planned now, in fact, to complement the new $14 million visitors center which recently began construction.

The current south end of the Inner Harbor promenade was the outcome of the longtime battle between the forces for old waterfront industry and the forces for new public access. You’re walking along the Inner Harbor promenade past the million dollar condos – and wham! – you can go no further. You’ve come to the end of the world of Inner Harbor tourism and smacked headlong into the world of private industry. Resolution has been drawn from stalemate.

People love to pose land use issues in terms of battles between various groups – yuppies versus real people, rich versus poor, tourists versus locals, residents versus industrialists, bikers versus joggers, etc. But in those terms, now that the land use decisions in the neighborhoods between the Inner Harbor and Fort McHenry – South Baltimore and Locust Point – have practically all been settled, it’s simply a matter of good “down to earth” design that will allow people to navigate the terrain.

Compared to most of depopulated Baltimore, this area has had a lot more winners than losers. The lines of demarcation between industry and neighborhoods are mostly clear and concise. Postmodern industry is a much better neighbor than the soot-belching sweatshops of old, so that their juxtapostion with million dollar condos actually evokes a romantic aspect. Numerous hardcore bicyclists and runners have discovered the road to Fort McHenry as well, and have fewer problems dealing with traffic and industrial conflicts here than elsewhere.

But for tourists (spelled “touri$t$”) and casual urban wanderers, Fort McHenry is still much more of a secret than it should be.

So, here’s the deal

The Museum of Industry, at Key Highway and Lawrence Street, is the current south end of the Inner Harbor waterfront promenade. Lawrence Street is so wide at this point that the city has proposed a median strip in its center and an unimpeded “view corridor” from Fort Avenue down to Key Highway and the waterfront. But instead of building a median strip, Lawrence Street should be narrowed on the east side to make room for a greenway park with an all-purpose bike/hike/walk trail which would function as an inland extension of the Inner Harbor promenade.

Beyond that, there is a large vacant lot in the east corner where Lawrence intersects Fort Avenue, which can gently guide this proposed new inland promenade eastward toward Fort McHenry. East of this lot, Fort Avenue can easily be narrowed to provide the new promenade with a safe identifiable crosswalk to the south side of street.

All the way from this point to Fort McHenry, about a mile, the south side of Fort Avenue is a natural place for a long lush leafy linear greenway park to envelop the new promenade and create an attractive new environment framing the street.

Some of this has already been done, like this view of the Fort Avenue sidewalk along Latrobe Park. Practically the whole stretch to Fort McHenry can easily be made to look like this. Much of it is already industrial buffers and simply needs to be translated into a more unified design. Much of this land is state and city owned, including play fields and a fire station. Much is parking lots that can be reconfigured to provide buffers.

Very little is actually built up all the way to the street. There is only one through street intersection - Andre Street. Fort Avenue is sufficiently wide so that it can be narrowed where necessary to maintain the continuity of this new promenade. This includes several bridges, one of which needs to be rebuilt anyway and so provides the opportunity to be widened to expand the promenade.

All of this is simply a matter of taking advantage of opportunities. After all, this is Fort McHenry we’re talking about here… The land of the free, the home of the brave, where that star spangled banner yet waves… Please stand up while you read that.

This is also a national landmark, and thus a legitimate reason for federal money to be spent. The feds have already financed most of the cost of the new Fort McHenry visitors center. The area around a national landmark up the road, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, got some major sprucing-up with federal dollars and Baltimore’s national treasure, Fort McHenry, could get that kind of treatment too.

Baltimore’s Inner Harbor promenade is already a tremendous success story. Extending it by slightly over a mile to Fort McHenry will create a new symmetry with the leg on the opposite side of the harbor to Canton. It’s as natural as singing “O” at the proper moment.

Inner City Bus Plan

2011-01-25T08:16:00.006-05:00

I've decided to reprint some of my articles from The Baltimore Brew that have gotten buried in the Brew archives, but are still relevant. Planning issues in Baltimore are notoriously cyclical - mostly never really resolved but just buried when we've gotten tired of talking about them or we've settled on some half-baked solution which will only satisfy the need to do something but not the issue itself. Transit offers many prime examples, of which this is one:

Expand Baltimore’s free Charm City Circulator buses

to cover the whole inner city?

Photo by Fern Shen

Gerald Neily June 7, 2010 at 3:51 pm Story Link View Comments

If they wish, folks can now stand at a Charles Street bus stop and wait while three or four of the same old MTA buses pass by until a bright, gleaming slightly-smaller CCC bus pulls up. And they’ll save $1.60 in the process.Beginning today, the City government is adding its Charm City Circulator to the four local bus routes the MTA already runs on Charles Street between Cross Street Market northward to Penn Station. Riders will now have shiny, new “clean, green” buses to choose from in the peak hour, in addition to the eighteen buses the MTA already runs along most of this route.

We watched today as the new Purple Route Circulator pulled up to Penn Station, drawing curious stares from regular MTA riders awaiting the #61 MTA, which also runs up Charles Street (and continues up into Roland Park.) If only THAT route were clean, green and free!

So, here’s an idea from the Department of Redundancy Department: since the city seems to have given up on the MTA, why not expand the Circulator into an entire inner-city transit system and let them take over the whole thing?

An MTA bus, with a free Charm City Circulator bus coming up behind it on almost identical route. . . except it doesn't go to Curtis Bay, hon! (Photo by Fern Shen)

As the second of three planned Charm City bus lines, this new Purple Route is the one which most closely crowds in on what the MTA already provides. Functionally, the routes are so similar that the simple essential difference jumps out: It’s not the MTA.

The birth of the Charm City Circulator is the culmination of decades of MTA failure to give the city’s business and civic leaders what they want, so now the city is doing it themselves.

And they already want even more. In addition to a third route to Hopkins Hospital coming soon, a planned extension to Fort McHenry is already in the works, and Midtown leaders want an extension to Charles Village and Hopkins University as well. Hopkins already runs its own bus service just as many other local colleges do – another byproduct of perceived MTA deficiencies.

Even the proposed $1.8 billion Red Line plan was conceived by business and civic leaders, much more than by the MTA.

As such, all of these transit initiatives totally fail to consider the comprehensive impact on the transit system as a whole, which is why they create such blatant redundancy.

It’s long past time to deal with these transit needs in a comprehensive manner. The MTA needs to finally recognize that the city does indeed have special needs that cannot be addressed as a one-size-fits-all transit system, and the city needs to recognize that it cannot just keep adding costly new lines willy-nilly to the transit stew.

But the MTA has heard all that before, and the city has apparently given up on them, and put its scarce and precious money where its mouth is.

So here is a solution that gives everyone what they want

The Charm City Circulator could be expanded to become a transit system serving the entire inner city. This would replace all local MTA service within the specified area. MTA bus service would be limited mostly to express buses between downtown and transit hubs where the two systems would meet at the perimeter, with intervening stops limited to major destinations and transfer points .

The transit hub locations would be carefully selected to define the boundaries between the two systems. Geography would be the determining factor, not political jurisdictions as is the case with most local/regional systems in Maryland and around the country.

Some obvious transit hub locations would include:

1 – The Mondawmin Metro station – The MTA already terminates all of its longer distance bus routes from outer communities such as Park Heights and Liberty Heights at this point to feed riders into the subway.

2 – The West Baltimore MARC station – MTA would run all of its remaining regional buses non-stop to downtown on the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway, as they already do with the #40 Quick-Bus.

3 – Baltimore Travel Plaza – MTA service would use the I-95 Fort McHenry Tunnel to downtown, while the Charm City Circulators would use Boston, O’Donnell, Eastern and Fayette through Canton, Fells Point and Highlandtown.

4 – Northwood Shopping Center – MTA express service would use Loch Raven Boulevard to downtown while the CCC would take over all local service to Charles Village and Waverly via 33rd Street, Charles Street, Greenmount Avenue et al, and to Morgan University.

The MTA’s cost savings from this concept could be passed on to Charm City to operate the new system, along with financing from a new “Transit District”. Another important source of participation would be from the colleges and other organizations which now pay for their own transit, but which should benefit greatly by being an integral part of the new service instead.

The boundaries of this district would closely conform to that of the high density portion of the city, where mass transit really needs to be an essential part of urban life, so that the costs and benefits of this service could be kept closely aligned. Geographically, this boundary would be fairly obvious, including roughly the Gwynns Falls to the west, Middle Branch to the south, I-95 to the east, and 39th Street to the north.

This makes much more sense than attempting to devise a regional transit district encompassing the city and all the surrounding suburbs. Metropolitan areas that have done that have had to endure constant carping from the outer areas that are barely served, and exploitation from those just beyond its borders. It also makes more sense than forcing all city residents to pay for this, and adding another arbitrary artifice at the city line (along with other taxes, insurance rates, public school zones, etc.). It would also enable transit fares to the outer areas to rise to more appropriate levels, and service to be optimized to the needs of longer distance riders.

The common perception is that as a statewide agency, the MTA is just too far above the people to be sensitive to their needs. From that, the Charm City Circulator was born, but it is a messy and inefficient compromise. The MTA and the city both need to realize that the city’s special urban needs should not be met by simply plopping a new system on top of the old one, but by making all aspects of the entire system work better.

- Fern Shen contributed to this post.

Transportation Funding

2011-01-17T08:12:00.010-05:00

Transportation funding should not be isolated from everything else we want from government

Let's cut the sanctimony about transportation funding. Our government raises money from all sorts of sources - all eventually coming from our pockets - and then spends it on all sorts of things as well. Our politicians should not evade their role by leaning on artifices such as the "transportation trust fund".It is their difficult and important job to decide how much money to raise and what to spend it on.

Any dollar spent on transportation is one less dollar spent on education, public safety, health, social services, aid to the poor or any of countless other things government spends money on. Transportation must compete with all these endeavors and not hide behind the idea of a "lock box" that forces the money to be spent only on transportation. There is nothing sacrosanct about transportation spending. And all of these uses need to be weighed against the idea of actually allowing people to keep some of their own money, and spend it on what they personally see fit. What a concept !!!

Sanctimony season is now upon us, with the state legislature going into session. Transportation spending is hence defined in broad lofty terms that make it sound inviolate, with words like such as "investment in our crumbling infrastructure". Or maybe not so lofty terms, like the headline for Michael Dresser's predictable column in the Sun of two days ago, "Using gas tax for budget threatens bigger potholes", as if pothole filling will inevitably be that part of the budget that will go unfilled if we decide to spend some of the money on somehow lesser budget items such as for school kids, police, firefighters, etc.

School kids vs. filling potholes, hmmmmm...

Of course, politicians make funding decisions all the time. We can tell their real priorities by looking at these funding decisions. The Baltimore City government decided that it is better to spend millions annually on running its own downtown bus system (even though we already pay the state MTA to run bus service) than to spend that money on a cleaner city, better education, fighting crime, keeping fire stations open, etc. That is our politicians' decision, which we need to make them defend at election time.

Politicians: Why are you spending millions of dollars a year on redundant bus service instead of keeping our fire stations open?

City officials have somehow been able to contort the issue to make it seem that because the city's Charm City Circulator is funded by the parking tax, it does not compete with other city needs. But being funded by the parking tax is just an accounting contrivance. Lots of other things are also funded by the parking tax. Parking tax money is just as green as any other money.

Allowing people to avoid the MTA versus keeping fire stations open, hmmmmm...

Michael Dresser asserts in his column that transportation "enjoys broader support than most state spending. After all, even conservative business leaders recognize a need to keep the veins and arteries of commerce flowing". If that is true, then transportation funding should be able to stand on its own merits instead of hiding behind protection afforded by a trust fund.

So yes, the multi-billion dollar InterCounty Connector (ICC) was a high priority of both Republican Governor Ehrlich and Democratic Governor O'Malley. But neither was ever forced to reveal why they would rather spend those billions on that highway then on other state needs. It's as if that money just came out of the sky. That in a nutshell is why our state budget is chronically out of whack.

But at least with regard to the ICC, their rhetoric had some correlation with their actions. On rail transit, O'Malley has constantly talked about the importance of building both the Red and Purple Lines, but he has quietly shelved both until after 2016 when he will be safely out of office and has effectively passed the buck. Obviously, he has decided that other things are much higher priorities, even if he avoids putting it in those terms. He should not try to hide his decision to kill his transit lines.

The ICC highway was "sold" by our current and former governor as being worth our multi-billion dollar investment. Maybe the sell job was more hype than substance, but it is up to all of us to discern the difference. The ICC is being built while transit plans sit unfunded. That speaks to the state's true priorities.

Meanwhile, transit advocates have been conducting a slick campaign to "sell" the Red Line, with big promises, including a website with pictures of shiny happy people and a "community compact." Obviously, it really hasn't worked for them - at least so far - although they've been working on it for about ten years.

The biggest image problem for transit is that people tend to love transit in the abstract, and then the closer we get to reality, the worse it looks to them. That is why the MTA has such a bad public image. Some of the same business and political leaders who strongly advocate for new transit like the Red Line avoid riding transit themselves. And looking at the MTA, who can blame them?

That is why the adopted transit strategy is to promote new transit rather than trying to fix what we already have. And that is why so-called "transit oriented development" is almost invariably dominated by massive parking structures. Somehow, even though we already have two rail transit lines that don't really work, they claim that the new Red Line will be the one that will work. It somehow won't be burdened by all the current woes. And the Red Line won't even connect to Baltimore's two existing rail transit lines.

Similarly, the city government was able to "sell" its Charm City Circulator bus system because it is separate from the bad old MTA that runs reputedly stinky buses on the same streets and stops at many of the same stops.

How long will the promoters of the city bus system be able to pull off this sell job? It may only work as long as people see the funding sources for all of these things in isolation. The city government does not have to pay for the MTA. It is run and paid for by the state, so the city can just promote and run its own competing system with no regard for the larger consequences to the transit system as a whole.

But everything affects everything else. By running and promoting its Charm City Circulator bus system, the city is preventing the larger MTA system from reaching out to these potential riders, and integrating itself into the mainstream. And meanwhile, the city closes fire stations, furloughs workers and tries to cut police pensions to pay its bills.

And the state builds more highways rather than transit lines. Transit operating deficits soar, while the state "budget crisis" continues. Acting as if the transportation trust fund somehow is or should be sacred only prevents resolving these issues.

Bottom line: Transportation needs to compete with every other government program for every dollar it spends. The best thing we can do is to try to come up with the best possible plans, programs and projects, so that the best possible case can be made that they are actually worth the money to fund them.

High speed rail

2010-10-08T13:27:00.007-04:00

What the cancellation of New Jersey's $8.7 billion rail tunnel to New York should mean for Maryland and everyone in between

New Jersey is on the same train as Maryland. New Jersey was willing to spend many billions on new commuter rail service, but not enough to pay for their ambitious plan. Their proposed $8.7 billion new tunnel under the Hudson River and a new commuter terminal next to Amtrak's Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan was cancelled yesterday because of fears of many more billions in cost overruns. Cost overruns are nothing to scoff at. Just ask about Boston's big dig.

This clearly points out the interrelatedness of local, state and national rail service needs and ambitions in the Northeast Corridor. The new tunnel would have freed much needed capacity in Amtrak's own rail tunnel under the Hudson, just as Amtrak's tunnels under Baltimore are similarly inadequate to handle their growing needs along with those of local MARC commuter rail service.

While New Jersey Transit has much greater financial wherewithal than Amtrak to pay for the expansion, it was still not enough. Meanwhile, Amtrak recently announced its own grand $120 billion plan for high speed rail in the Northeast Corridor, but with no money to pay for it, not even a relatively piddly $8.7 billion. Unless the federal government suddenly writes a magic blank check for a project that is not exactly "shovel ready", labor intensive or responsive to middle American voters, it will most likely fall to the bottom of the priority pile. This is not your ordinary federal pork barrel.

Maryland's own plan for high speed rail was quietly scuttled a few years ago because it was perceived as catering to fat-cat expense account travelers, just as Amtrak's own Acela is essentially seen as just another train with comfier seats and higher fares which skips the minor whistle stop stations. Attention has since zeroed-in on the immediate needs of MARC and Amtrak commuters, beleaguered by "hell trains" and strained infrastructure.

The bottom line: Transit needs between Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston are too great and too interrelated to be dealt with solely by the individual states or even Amtrak. All the grand multi-billion plans need to be tied together into a single unified framework that responds to all the needs from the most glamorous futuristic high speed rail to the bottom-feeding commuters.

New Jersey's $8.7 to $14 billion Hudson tunnel plan just did not fit into such an overarching vision. It would have lavished the greatest amount of money on creating a brand new rail network at the lowest level on the local-to-interregional hierarchy, rather than addressing the needs of the entire hierarchy. Yes, the new tunnel would have freed up much needed capacity on Amtrak's own line, but would do nothing to upgrade it physically or functionally.

Here is a more rational approach:

1. Systematically upgrade the existing Amtrak Northeast Corridor line to modern physical and functional standards -

Replacing the functionally obsolete West Baltimore rail tunnel is a perfect example. This should not be oversold by confusing it with high speed rail or any kind of quantum increase in speed or capacity. It is simply sorely needed to maintain what we already have, for Amtrak, for MARC and for freight service.

2. Conduct an intense technology analysis for high speed rail -

Technology assessment is conspicuously lacking in Amtrak's recent high speed rail report. It would be pathetic to use existing off-the-shelf 20th century technology borrowed from Europe for a new mid-21st century rail system. While it may be arguable that speed for speed's sake is not that important, and that there's not enough usable difference between 200 and 300 mph, there are many other critical factors such as operating cost, operating flexibility, capacity, and ability to negotiate grades. Here are a few crucial questions:

Can control be sufficiently automated to accommodate far greater train frequency?

Can the system support local off-line stations such as in Columbia, White Marsh or Towson?

Can the system support automated real-time dispatching so that non-stop service between any two stations can be arranged as soon as there are enough passengers who want to go there?

Can steep grades be supported to allow a bridge over the Hudson River instead of a far riskier and more expensive tunnel beneath it?

Would the system make small vehicles economically and operationally feasible, promoting very frequent headways, smaller platforms and less costly and disruptive alignments such as using the Howard Street tunnel under downtown Baltimore?

On the other hand, compatibility with high speed rail elsewhere has been overrated. The United States is too big and diverse to get hung up on compatibility with what might get done between Chicago and St. Louis.

3. Figure out how to pay for it - This was another gaping hole in the Amtrak report. New Jersey can't pay for this. Maryland can't be expected to pay for it. Amtrak can't pay for it. Maryland's Maglev study actually made the case for a strong private sector role. Another very promising source is highway tolls. The New Jersey project relied on a heavy infusion on toll revenue from the New York Port Authority. Delaware's portion of I-95 is a cash cow. Maryland has used a billion of its toll money on a highly dubious I-95 widening scheme that will simply push its bottlenecks to White Marsh. A far more rational plan would be to tailor tolls to manage Northeast Corridor traffic demand and finance transit. Tolls should be allowed to variably increase whenever congestion raises to the point where less traffic flow would take place with a lower toll. It's far preferable to divert traffic to transit in response to tolls, than due to congestion which essentially just makes the highways into parking lots and the local exit ramps into escape routes.

4. Create an authority that can do all this -

A Northeast U.S. Transportation Authority should be established that can manage both the interregional highway and rail systems between Boston and northern Virginia. It should include I-95, I-295, I-895, and most of the other major expressways, as well as VRE, MARC, SEPTA, NJT, NY MTA, MBTA and any other alphabet soup commuter rail systems, and also promote private sector involvement. They could run MARC trains from DC to Philly and SEPTA trains from Philly to New York, eliminating the arbitrary intervening terminals at Trenton, NJ and Newark, DE. All tolls and train fares would also be integrated into one system. The existing patchwork of state and regional transportation operations is clearly obsolete.

In sum, the problems of the proposed $120 billion Amtrak high speed rail line and the $8.7 billion New Jersey Transit tunnel under the Hudson is that they don't address transportation as a system. With all those billions at stake, the entire Northeast Corridor deserves better.

2010-06-08T12:25:00.010-04:00

SAY IT AGAIN: A HEAVY RAIL RED LINE WOULD ACTUALLY BE CHEAPER (AND MUCH SMARTER)

A potential Metro/MARC/Bus Transit Terminal along the Amtrak tracks at Edison Highway belies the MTA's contention that heavy rail is more expensive than light rail (Bayview is in background)

A Sun editorial of May 3rd repeats the oft-told falsehood about the MTA's Red Line opposition. That is, the Sun states that heavy rail would be "pricier" than light rail. So it must be repeated again: The Sun is absolutely wrong. A heavy rail plan would actually be far less expensive than the MTA's $1.8 billion light rail plan, in addition to being far more rational.

The Sun falls into this trap because they follow the same philosophy the MTA did in proposing their abominable one reversible track tunnel for the Red Line. The MTA previously proposed a one track tunnel because of their philosophy that it is OK to propose something cheaper and crummier in order to hammer out something that works on paper, and worry about the consequences later. That has been the overall reasoning behind their entire 15 mile Red Line proposal, most visibly by using undersized vehicles and squeezing the line onto Edmondson Avenue and Boston Street where it really does not fit.

A much better philosophy would be to build each rail transit segment right, with increments of as small as two miles apiece or even less, added onto what is already in place. Virtually every successful modern rail transit system in the world has been built through incremental expansion, rather than starting at square one with every new project as the MTA wants to do.

Each high quality segment would then become a solid foundation for building the next piece after that. A two-mile extension of a 16 mile line would create an 18 mile line. With the next two mile extension, it would become a 20 mile line. Baltimore is actually in a great position to build it this way because we already have the necessary solid foundation in the existing heavy rail subway, built to far higher quality standards than what the MTA now wants with its Red Line.

Inexpensive East Baltimore Extension

The MTA could easily build a very short inexpensive heavy rail extension beyond Hopkins Hospital that would leverage the entire 16 mile heavy rail system already built to Owings Mills, gaining the new ridership for many very long and wide-ranging trips from simply building a very short extension.

1.3 mile Metro extension along Amtrak from Hopkins Hospital to Edison Highway

Connectivity would grow geometrically. The entire heavy rail line could then be easily accessible, in the fastest possible way, to the MARC commuter rail system northeastward to Harford and Cecil Counties and southwestward to Washington DC. A truly comprehensive transit hub could finally be provided at the east terminus of the rail line, centrally located to serve virtually all major bus lines in east and northeast Baltimore, as a symmetrical compliment to the current Mondawmin hub. This connectivity would allow much of the MTA bus system to be restructured to take maximum advantage of the travel time advantage of the subway, as well as connecting the bus routes to each other and creating one place in northeast Baltimore from which you could get anywhere. Downtown bus traffic could finally be cut significantly.

Yes, the MTA is currently in the process of studying a heavy rail extension from Hopkins Hospital northward to Morgan State as part of a previous proposal to send it all the way out to White Marsh and Middle River. But they have buried this study, despite it being labeled "high priority", because it fails for the same blanket reason they have condemned all heavy rail. It proposes too much too soon, with too much of it underground which makes it far too expensive.

Instead, the heavy rail extension should go eastward where it can come out of the ground very quickly along the Amtrak tracks, and it can be terminated anywhere that a comprehensive transfer hub and MARC station can be located most feasibly, such as Edison/Monument or Bayview.

Finding the best location for a new East Baltimore MARC station is critical. The MTA wants to try to convince Amtrak and Norfolk Southern to let them build two new MARC stations only a couple miles apart, one at Bayview and one at Broadway, for the Red Line and Metro respectively. Extending the heavy rail line along the Amtrak tracks would mean the MTA would only need to build one new MARC station wherever it works best, with the fastest possible connection to downtown and the rest of the transit system. Travel time from MARC to downtown could be as little as five to six minutes.

After community cajoling, the MTA did have their consultants "cost out" a three mile Metro extension from Hopkins Hospital to the Baltimore Travel Plaza south of Bayview, at $700 million. This seems like a reasonable cost that a line that would result in a huge increase in transit system connectivity, but they could build far less than that in a first phase and still make sense. But of course, the MTA rejected this whole concept out of hand even before they made a single stab at analyzing it, unlike their own pet Red Line alternatives for which they tortured the data continuously until they got the numbers to work, even after they submitted it to the feds.

Inexpensive West Baltimore Extension

Similarly, a very short and inexpensive heavy rail extension could be built from Lexington Market to the existing West Baltimore MARC station in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, where it would similarly leverage the entire bus and rail systems, including MARC to Washington. All of West Baltimore would then be easily accessible to the entire existing Metro, including State Center and Hopkins Hospital, as well as all the bus connections elsewhere along the line.

1.8 mile Metro extension along Franklin-Mulberry corridor from Lexington Market to West MARC Station

The Lexington Market station could then become the comprehensive central hub it was originally intended to be. An inexpensive new escalator connection could be provided over to the light rail line on Howard Street, and a downtown bus hub could be located on a state-owned parking lot connected to the station along Eutaw north of Saratoga.

In contrast, the MTA Red Line plan avoids their Lexington Market subway station altogether, largely giving up on creating the transit oriented district that has been envisioned since the 1960s inception of rail planning, in favor of new transit-oriented dreams for waterfront land that has largely already been redeveloped. In addition, the MTA plan wedges the Red Line into the median strip of the Franklin-Mulberry "highway to nowhere" as inexpensively as possible, with only the same old promise that eventually the ill-conceived and obsolete expressway would be "capped over" for new development, rather than rebuilding the corridor right as an integral part of the transit plan.

True transit-oriented development in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor as envisioned by BaltiMorphosis.com

Building blocks for the future

The short and affordable east and west Baltimore segments would be perfect launching pads for future extensions that could be built whenever we can afford them, and whenever we get a transit agency that is smart enough to plan them. Unlike Morgan State or Edmondson Avenue, the proposed heavy rail extensions would be located in existing rail corridors where they can be extended without wedging them into congested city streets or building lengthy expensive tunnels.

In East Baltimore, there are existing rail right-of-way corridors into Highlandtown, Canton, Dundalk, Essex, Middle River and White Marsh, so a whole tree of rail transit branches off the proposed trunk could easily be built.

In West Baltimore, the Amtrak corridor proceeds southwestward to the huge underutilized Southwestern High School site and FredHilton, gaining access to additional large potential transit markets. A relatively short tunnel mostly under cemeteries could bring the line back up to Edmondson Village and emerge from underground in Baltimore National Pike (US 40) just west of Cooks Lane, where it could eventually go all the way to Howard County. A simple branch to Security could also be built at the Beltway, simply incorporated into the inevitable Beltway reconstruction project when its untenable four level interchange at I-70 is torn down.

In contrast, the MTA Red Line could never be feasibly extended beyond Security Boulevard without running disruptively into Baltimore County's anti-sprawl urban growth boundary. On the east side, the MTA's meandering "button-hook" alignment to Bayview clearly precludes their previously proposed future extensions from ever being feasible. Moreover, the MTA Red Line's slow overall 44 minute travel time estimate already clearly slams up against the outer threshold of tolerability for a modern urban rail line.

So the MTA Red Line shoots it wad all at once - $1.8 Billion for an isolated, disconnected and unexpandable Red Line.

Next steps

The Red Line has become an ever more expensive monster based on the MTA's demonstrated illogic of starting its new transit line at square one, ignoring the need to fix what they have, and making a host of new mistakes that will somehow have to be fixed later. Their Red Line doesn't connect with or take advantage of what they've already built, and to make up for that, they feel they need to spend $1.8 billion (and rising) all at once to build something that passes muster with their own faulty logic and numbers games.

The only prudent course would be to scrap the MTA's light rail Red Line, in favor of a plan that affordably adds onto their existing heavy rail system, several miles and a few hundred million at a time, in order to grow the system in a comprehensive connected manner.

But as long as the MTA can somehow convince people like the Sun that heavy rail is too expensive, we will continue be get a fragmented series of MTA mistakes that cost too much, disrupt communities during and after construction, and need fixing as soon as they're done. It's time to end the MTA Red Line madness and instill some sanity in our rail transit planning, one smart segment at a time.

Amtrak

2010-06-08T08:13:00.003-04:00

OVERDOSING ON AMTRAK

I just completed a trip on Amtrak's "all the rail you can stand for fifteen days" plan. Pretty hardcore - All the way from Baltimore to the San Fransisco Bay Area, down to LA and back. Six nights attempting to sleep in a coach seat. Nearly 7000 miles. About 160 scheduled train hours plus overtime. All for only $389 plus a small contribution from the American taxpayers payable in annual billion dollar chunks.

Riding Amtrak couldn't possibly be any more different from air travel. You must suspend all notions of time. There's no visible security whatsoever. Super spacious seats, but still quite cramped when you realize that this seat comprises your entire home for the interminable duration. It is an otherworldly experience just witnessing how people improvise with their seat to try to get some sleep. Some end up with their heads on the floor and feet in the air. Other contortions are even more indescribable. People elbowing and head-butting total strangers. John and Yoko's "sleep-ins" were never like this.

You could really wreak some privacy havoc by publishing pictures of these folks online. And to think I slept with all of them. Well, I didn't really sleep. I use that word loosely away from its carnal application. Come to think of it, I didn't sleep at all for six nights, but Amtrak is such an extra-dimensional experience of suspended animation that the whole concept of sleep eventually loses all meaning anyway.

But the big thing is the views of America. Though your domicile is but a single coach seat, your front yard is the entire country. You soon rediscover what a huge wonderful wondrous country this is. Purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain indeed. Unlike through the windshield of a car, your view has no visible means of support. You don't see ribbons of highway. You can't even see the rails. There are no signs or billboards beckoning for you to do this or that. There is nothing between you and America. You're usually going slow enough to fixate on the smallest detail if you so wish - a single house or yard or crop or weed or riverbank or whatnot. Except that it all just floats by. You can't stop and interact. It's all just out there.

THE AMTRAK NICHE

Amtrak has benefited greatly from the niche-ification of America. Airlines have become America's mass transit between places more than a couple hundred miles apart, where the human cattle queue-up at airport security gates and strap-in and do what they're told. But the lunatic fringe who don't care about actually getting from Point A to B in just a few hours is now large enough that Amtrak is setting ridership records even though it is as irrelevant as ever to moving the masses.

Yes, from a transportation system standpoint, Amtrak is mostly irrelevant. Amtrak is too labor intensive to enjoy any significant economies of scale, except in the dense northeast and perhaps a few other places. Amtrak's long-term wish list is essentially no more ambitious than to replace their aging fleet and fix some track bottlenecks that will allow it to go incrementally faster and have fewer conflicts with freight trains, and perhaps reinstate some marginal routes.

It is not Amtrak, but freight rail which has the big potential for growth as the world attempts to transition to efficient energy use. One of the few things that rouse Amtrak passengers is when their train is waylaid by an even slower 150 car freight train, but that freight train saves a whole lot more energy than Amtrak ever could. Amtrak only gets in the way.

AMTRAK IS ECO-TOURISM

It dawned on me that I was an eco-tourist, another product of the niche-ification of America. No, I'm not in the class of the world's #1 eco-tourist, Al Gore (sorry, Bono), who gallivants the globe collecting awards, racking frequent flier miles, holding big rock concerts and rousing the populace. But I did get that same kind of sanctimonious high from knowing that I traveled 7000 miles without a car or a plane ride, whatever the point.

So when I finally stopped over in various hotels in Chicago, San Fransisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and Albuquerque to get an actual night's sleep in an actual bed, and I read the hotel placards that said the fate of the world was in my hands, and that I had a choice to either re-use the towels and save the planet or cause its doom by using them only once, my eco-conscience was unmoved. In order to stay on my 15 day Amtrak regimen, I stayed in each hotel only one night, so my dirty linen was washed to the max, and the world will thus go to hell in a laundry cart because of me. But I slept well.

To each his own. The Baltimore Sun reported a month ago that the resort town of Ocean City, Maryland has suspended its recycling program to save money, which the Sun said will cause thousands of ecologically minded tourists to burn more gas driving hundred of miles farther to other resorts so they can spend their eco-dollars feeling good when they throw away their bottles and paper. Ocean City is not a last resort.

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT A TRAIN THAT'S MAGIC

So now I've finally ridden on most of every long-distance route Amtrak offers. I understand viscerally why people love railroads and want to build rail mass transit even though it often makes little sense as a structural element of an actual transportation system. I hope I've demonstrated over the years in my blog how it actually could make sense, with a truly integrated hierarchical system instead of overhyped projects ranging from the overweight underpowered Amtrak Acela to the proposed streetcar-on-steroids Baltimore Red Line.

There is something about the rails that alters our perceptions of reality. But realizing our human condition is the first step toward a treatment and cure. The same kind of railroad mind blowing takes place when contemplating a short meandering 45 minute trip on the proposed Red Line from one side of Baltimore to the other. The Baltimore Red Line is just the quick-fix rail gateway drug toward the 7000 mile coast-to-coast Amtrak overdose.

Amtrak

2010-06-08T06:34:00.002-04:00

MY RANKING OF AMTRAK'S LONG DISTANCE ROUTES

#11 - SILVER/PALMETTO

New York to Miami - The boring east coast, using antiquated single-level equipment because the Superliners wouldn't fit through the Baltimore tunnels and because it would be a waste to use them on these runs anyway.

#10 - CRESCENT

New York to New Orleans - It skirts the mountains so it's not much better than the east coast trains.

#9 - LAKE SHORE LIMITED

New York/Boston via Buffalo to Chicago - Very nice east and south of Albany through the Hudson Valley and Berkshires, but that's about it.

#8 - TEXAS EAGLE/SUNSET LIMITED

Los Angeles via San Antonio to New Orleans/Chicago - Some nice desert and double decker Superliners. Takes even more forevers than most Amtrak runs.

#7 - CITY OF NEW ORLEANS

Chicago to New Orleans - Amtrak didn't rename it thus until after the Steve Goodman/Arlo Guthrie song about the Illinois Central train that preceded it. The Mississippi bayou is nice.

#6 - EMPIRE BUILDER

Chicago to Seattle/Portland - Overrated in my estimation. Ratio of scenery to distance is low. Hits Glacier Park in the dark too often, and misses the best part anyway.

#5 - CAPITOL LIMITED

Chicago to Washington DC - The great Pittsburgh skyline and lots of great river valleys from the Ohio to the Mon to the Youk to the Potomac, and as much of Lake Erie as you need to see, and it uses Superliners too.

#4 - CARDINAL

Chicago via Cincinnati to New York - Extreeeeemely slow, even by Amtrak standards. Lovely trip over the Appalachians and the USA's most impressive view under a bridge through the New River Gorge. The Ohio River is the best river to see at night with chemical plants and bridges all lit up and Cincinnati has the best skyline view for a city of its size. When the route was extended from DC to New York, the Superliners were given to the Capitol Limited, which had just had a huge train wreck near Rockville.

#3 - CHIEF

Los Angeles via Kansas City to Chicago - Amtrak's fastest long distance train, but still slow. The highlight is the mountains north of Albuquerque to Trinidad, Colorado.

#2 - COAST STARLIGHT

Los Angeles to Seattle - The super-highlight is hovering right over the Pacific coast north of Santa Barbara on land preserved au naturel by the U.S. Air Force, and then climbing inland to San Luis Obispo, so you can get the same thrills from the local Surfliner trains. It hits NoCal's spectacular Mount Shasta at night, unfortunately. Try to schedule for a full moon.

#1 - CALIFORNIA ZEPHYR

Chicago via Denver to SF Bay Area - This is the one you must see before you die, at least between Denver and Glenwood Springs, although once you get there, I defy you to leave the train. The climb and descent west of Denver could probably be rivaled by the Space Shuttle experienced only in slo-mo. And then west of the continental divide, it follows the Colorado River nearly from its source, including many miles where the canyon is only wide enough for the river and you. I think I left my jaw back on the track. From there into California, the deserts and high Sierras would be fantastic enough even without what came before.

Comprehensive Rail Solution

2010-02-02T08:01:00.020-05:00

LET'S FOCUS ON WHAT WE REALLY NEED

Freight, intercity high speed rail, and regional transit such as the Red Line - It all needs to be envisioned together, along with the role of Baltimore in the world economy, and between the inner city, our neighboring cities and the suburbs.

Mark Reutter's latest article in the Baltimore Brew is a great starting point for thinking out loud about the chaotic state of comprehensive rail planning in the Baltimore region. The Maryland Department of Transportation's recent award of a $70 million down-payment from the Feds to begin work on the replacement of the Amtrak tunnel in West Baltimore is but a tiny droplet compared to the multi-billion dollar "needs" which have been defined by MDOT and all concerned.

Like spoiled children in a toy store who don't know what they really wants or really need, we simply clamor for everything. Briefly, rounded to the nearest billion or so, is some of the MDOT wish-list:

1 - A billion to replace the Amtrak tunnel with one that finally meets 1930s standards.

2 - A few billion for a new freight line through Baltimore to replace the CSX line which includes the notorious tunnel under Howard Street.

3 - A few more billion for a true high speed transit line between Downtown Baltimore, Washington and BWI-M airport, as planned by the MTA.

4 - More billions to extend this high speed line northward to Philadelphia and New York.

5 - Another billion or so for general MARC improvements to stations, tracks and whatnot.

6 - Several billion for a Metro heavy rail extension from Greenbelt to BWI-M airport. The rest of MDOT's grand ambitions within the DC metropolitan area shall go unmentioned here.

7 - A couple billion for the Red Line.

8 - Something less than a billion for a nice cheap extension of the MARC Line from Camden Station through the someday-to-be-vacated Howard Street CSX tunnel to 26th Street in Charles Village, then east to Clifton Park or so, as called for in the MARC master plan.

9 - Another relatively cheap augmentation to MARC for local transit on between Dorsey and Camden Station and between Odenton and Edgewood, as called for in the 2002 MTA regional rail plan.

10 - Many more billions to complete the regional rail plan to Towson, White Marsh, Dundalk and maybe some other places. Otis Rolley modestly estimated this at a mere $25 billion in an "audacious ideas" article. Audacious indeed. (The $25B includes the Red Line.)

So you can see how the tiny $60 million tip of the federal iceberg escalates into major "throw money at our problems" fantasy land. Our recent award is something around a thousandth of the total price tag of the MDOT wish list.

BACK TO REALITY

What is very obviously needed are some general principals to govern this indulgent display for someone else's largess. I suggest the following:

1 - Figure out the freight first - Not only is the hazardous material now traveling through our obsolete tunnels something to fear, and not only is freight movement a crucial national economic engine, but the freight solution will largely dictate the passenger solution. Moreover, the freight solution is relatively low-tech. All freight needs in Baltimore is just a spacious, flat, safe, well-ventilated tunnel with double tracks for double stacks.

2 - Position transit for Baltimore's emerging role - Movement between cities is where the true growth in mass transit is in the 21st century. The fate and role of Baltimore will increasingly be defined by its position between Washington, Philadelphia and New York, not its position between Woodlawn and Dundalk. Baltimore is now seen as a funky low-cost outpost between its neighboring world-class cities, both in terms of the information-age "creative class" and in terms military, national security and other growing public sectors. Aberdeen and Fort Meade were the recent big military winners because of their proximity to Washington, not Baltimore.

THE SOLUTION

Based on these two simple premises, it's surprising how easily some real solutions emerge from the mass fantasy confusion:

1 - Design the new Amtrak tunnel in West Baltimore to serve as Baltimore's future freight route. This is the best place to put a freight line, so it should be designed that way and eventually freight should be allowed to take over and passenger trains should be moved elsewhere. At a billion, this freight route is a bargain compared with some of the other solutions that have been put forth, such as tunneling southward under the harbor. This would be the best billion we could ever spend to ensure Baltimore's port freight future.

This new tunnel cannot and will not be designed for true high speed rail. At best, it can only shave several minutes off the travel time, but it can be designed to be ideal for freight trains.

2 - Begin serious planning for true high speed passenger rail in the northeast U.S. corridor between Washington, Baltimore and New York. There is much about the extensive planning that MTA has already conducted that can serve as a starting point, although this time, it needs to be serious, not just a study that gets stuck on a shelf when it's done. The MTA obviously has had no faith in their own high speed rail planning because they abandoned it before it was even completed, adding to their trail of failed transit planning studies over the years.

High speed intercity passenger rail must be thought of as mass transit. You have your fare card. You step up to the platform and wait for your train. No reservations. No fixed schedules. It should be fully demand-responsive. For that reason, smaller automated vehicles are undoubtedly the way to go. Amtrak Acela is a 1959 Edsel compared with what is needed. Why should we spend billions redesigning the existing Amtrak tracks to accommodate 1959 Edsels?

The optimum dimensions for a 21st century passenger rail tunnel are probably achieved by the existing cramped Howard Street freight tunnel, where sleek new high speed vehicles can negotiate with ease. The grades should be no problem, and any sharp turns would be close enough to the stations to be merely a minor factor. The Baltimore Arena site would make a perfect downtown terminal.

High speed rail should be planned to replace Amtrak. Incredulously enough, the MTA has envisioned its proposed high speed rail as diverting only a negligible number of Amtrak riders. But Maryland should be in the forefront of a full transition from Amtrak to an entirely new passenger system, so that the existing Edsel vehicles and tracks can be given over to freight.

3 - Focus Baltimore's regional rail system on serving the high density inner city, and on being a local distributor for the intercity high speed lines. Baltimore's inner city is finally ready to be converted to a totally transit-oriented domain, where it can serve to extend the "reach" of Baltimore's connections to Washington, Philadelphia and New York. All it needs is efficient, well designed and well connected transit. The lower density outer city and suburbs are nowhere near ready to make this transition. These areas are still in the process of exerting their independence from Baltimore's core, which started in the 1950s and accelerated with the completion of the Beltway in the mid-'60s and will not abate until it needs to.

All we really need is rail transit that allows the high density inner city to function as an integrated urban unit, so that once you get there, from Hopkins Hospital or New York or anywhere in between, you can get anywhere.

The MTA Red Line typifies the political urge to make any rail line all-things to all-people, urban and suburban alike, which ultimately results in failure to accomplish anything. The Red Line needs very fast, very high capacity service between efficient comprehensive transit hubs located where everything comes together. In that it now totally fails. There must be a single integrated downtown core hub. The Franklin-Mulberry corridor wasteland needs to be totally transformed. And there needs to be an East Baltimore hub with efficient connections between the Metro, MARC and the bus system. All of these can be connected with a short, simple Red Line that shares the existing Metro line tunnel between Downtown and Hopkins Hospital.

We need to keep our eyes on the prize, which is Baltimore and Maryland's specific role in the world economy and along the northeast corridor of world-class cities.

Decade in Review

2009-12-31T09:09:00.000-05:00

MARYLAND'S DECADE IN TRANSPORTATION:

SAME AS IT EVER WAS

The most recent installment of Michael Dresser's column in the Sun was an excellent summation of the top ten transportation stories of the past decade. But what really struck me is how little has changed in the past decade. Sure, we couldn't have expected to be driving around in flying cars like The Jetsons by now, but why are we stuck in neutral?

Michael Dresser's list could have been written prior to the '00s instead of after it was over. The names would have been slightly different, but the ten stories could have been just the same.

So now, as another decade turns, let's party like it's 1999 and see how the descriptions on Michael Dresser's own list (presented in his same order) might have read if it had been written before this decade rather than after:

10 - Light rail double tracking - Governor Schaefer had to fire MTA Administrator Ron Hartman for the wildly underestimated cost of the central light rail line and the ensuing cover-up. After about fifty percent worth of cost overruns and ridership underruns later, the line was finally completed in 2006, as it had been originally conceived in the 1980s. Some of the second track had been deleted from the project that opened in 1992 - a deja vu for the single track Red Line tunnel currently planned by the MTA under Cooks Lane.

9 - Continuing deadly carnage on the highways - Will this ever change?

8 - Transportation funding crisis - Gas tax stuck at 23.5 cents per gallon. Read Governors Glendening, Ehrlich and O'Malley's lips: No new gas taxes. The good thing about a lack of funding is that it requires intelligent planning instead of throwing money at the problems. The bad thing is that when real money is not available, planners prefer to throw play money instead.

7 - Inner Harbor water taxi done on the cheap - It's a tiny body of water with big body currents, which is its unique charm. Baltimore is not Venice or San Francisco or anywhere else. Respect it or face deadly consequences.

6 - Ouster of MTA Administrator - Wheels fall off buses, metaphorically and literally. Baltimore transit system ridiculed far and wide. See #10.

5 - Baltimore and Washington compete for the same transit money - Washington cleans Baltimore's clock because they take transit seriously. Planning for Baltimore's Red Line began at the turn of the 2000s and a decade later we still don't have a feasible fundable or workable project.

4 - Bay bridge needs major repairs - What else is new?

3 - Planning to replace Woodrow Wilson Bridge begins in earnest - We should have savored this one. It was most likely the last time a billion dollar project will ever be done in Maryland without tolls. And nowadays, it seems that every project costs in the billions.

2 - Proposed InterCounty Connector emerges as statewide political issue - Governor Glendening tries his best to kill the highway, but it refuses to die. Future Gubernatorial wannabes line up to save it, most notably his handpicked successor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

1 - Baltimore has a dangerous undersized freight rail tunnel under Howard Street - Fixing our entire rail system, not only freight but passenger transit at the local, regional and even interregional magnetic levitation or other future high speed technology, depends crucially on what we do about this obsolete downtown tunnel and the trains that now use it. So ten years later, we have done nothing, and planned almost as little.

Gee, writing this 1999 list was so easy, I might as well write the list for 2019 while I'm at it.

To be continued...

MLK-FMX

2009-10-09T08:54:00.023-04:00

A DIRECT SOLUTION TO THE FRANKLIN-MULBERRY STALEMATE DISASTER

The solution: Consolidating all the traffic into the current eastbound roadway to the right, thus freeing the remaining land now occupied by the median strip and the westbound roadway (left) for new transit-oriented development linked to the community.

Nobody denies that the US 40 "Highway to Nowhere" was instrumental in destroying the Franklin-Mulberry community in West Baltimore in the 1970s. But the truly amazing thing is that, three decades later, the City insists on maintaining that highway as-is, even in its so-far futile attempt to rebuild the community around it. That hasn't worked over the past thirty years and it won't work in the next thirty. And rail transit alone can't fix it either, as every other Baltimore area community with rail transit can attest, from Howard Street to Hunt Valley and Owings Mills.

The City is still in a state of denial about the cancerous effect created by this highway. Along with the MTA, they only see the wasteland it created as a vacuum which the transit Red Line can fill (with more parking for MARC commuters). They still cling to the expensive 1970s plan to cover over the highway "ditch" rather than truly repair it, which has been demonstrated to be unworkable by the decades of inaction.

Land along Franklin Street between Fremont and Schroeder remained undeveloped for decades because of the harmful economic effects of the adjacent "highway to nowhere". Beyond is the high rise building to be vacated by the Social Security Administration.

Back in the early 1990s, the City Housing Commissioner Dan Henson proposed the elimination of the entire "highway to nowhere" as part of the City's bold plan for Heritage Crossing. This proposal was made in a manner typical of the Schmoke administration. Like Mayor Schmoke's crusade for "medicalization" of drug offenders, it was an enlightened idea, but it was simply thrown on the table. Then-Governor and former Mayor Schaefer had no temperament for dealing with such out of the box thinking, and without wider backing, Mayor Schmoke's ideas were marginalized, just as Heritage Crossing itself was never incorporated into a larger plan to redevelop surrounding northwest Baltimore.

Typical of Mayor Schmoke and Commissioner Henson, they did not even reach out to the fellow bureaucrats at the City Planning Department who occupied the same office building as the city housing department, for support in how a plan dealing with the obsolete "highway to nowhere" could be made truly workable. (That included me.)

Nothing substantive has changed. The City government still has some lone crusaders like Dan Henson, but still resists comprehensive out-of-the-box thinking. The state has another former Mayor as Governor who still thinks of himself as the Baltimore's patriarchal guardian. And ideas like the Red Line show that there is still much more hype than substance to the plans. If the Red Line goes to construction in its current form, it will certainly end up in the same dysfunctional state as the rest of our rail transit system, particularly Schaefer's vaunted central light rail line.

THE CURRENT HIGHWAY MAKES CONGESTION WORSE ANYWAY

The crowning irony of all this is that keeping the gaping, sprawling, obsolete "highway to nowhere" also causes chronic congestion on Martin Luther King Boulevard underneath it. What we now have is a very free-flowing "highway to nowhere" up above, with all the turning movements bottling up MLK down below. By far the worst is the heavy left turn from northbound MLK to westbound Franklin Street, crammed into an exceedingly short left turn lane and subjected to an electronically variable second left turn lane installed as a pathetic "band aid" a few years ago.

The City has recently developed a very cavalier attitude about traffic congestion. The City is more than willing to squeeze the Edmondson Avenue and Boston Street communities to accommodate the MTA's version of the Red Line, cutting traffic capacity by up to half, which assures that congestion will get increasingly bad. But they are not willing to mess with traffic flow as it directly impacts downtown, so that commuters can act as they see fit, to drive to the dominant downtown parking garages.

Traffic will continue to dominate downtown where it really matters, in order to feed the city's development machine. To do this, the downtown section of the proposed Red Line will be kept underground out of the way to allow the parking garages to continue to attract maximum traffic.

In contrast, the City acts as if motorists using Edmondson, Boston Street and MLK can fend for themselves. Unlike on downtown streets like Pratt and Lombard, the outer areas have loads of alternate routes, even if they are many miles away like Fulton/Monroe, I-95 and the Beltway. Unlike downtown, regional traffic has room to "sort itself out" and disperse in ways that will obscure the costs and benefits.

Technical tools like computer simulation models for traffic volumes and flows are of little use in shedding light on all this. They were developed to evaluate major regional highways, not micro-level local impacts.

Apologists for this lack of technical rigor point to situations like the dismantling of the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, where the traffic reportedly disappeared like magic. But there, all the proper infrastructure was in place to restore balance to the urban travel patterns. Unfortunately, we don't have that in Baltimore. Instead of effective BART regional and MUNI local transit, we have our MTA vainly attempting to compete with many tens of thousands of downtown parking garage spaces which were built to be filled up. And the San Francisco Bay Area, in spite of its urban success, still has an intractable regional sprawl problem fed by the difficulty of urban movement. The Richmond-San Rafael Bridge now connects the East Bay sprawl to Marin County much more than the urban Embarcadero Freeway once did.

But there are parallels between the Embarcadero and Franklin-Mulberry Expressway. Both have served both traffic and communities badly. And while the Embarcadero conspicuously stood between the waterfront and high income communities, Franklin-Mulberry stands between downtown and low to middle income communities.

THE SIMPLE SOLUTION

Here's the simple answer which strips the inherent problems of the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway down to the most basic solution: Just tear down its northernmost bridge over MLK Boulevard and consolidate the traffic onto the other southernmost bridge. In this way, the "highway to nowhere" will be downsized from a huge fragmented Interstate highway swath to a single narrow overpass. There are currently only two lanes on each bridge, but the Interstate-standard shoulder easily provides room for a third lane. Downtown highway bridges don't even have shoulders - the Orleans and Russell Street Viaducts certainly don't, and there was never a clamor to provide them the last time they were rebuilt.

Franklin Street looking west from MLK Blvd. between expressway bridge, which should be knocked down (left), and Heritage Crossing community (right).

Eastbound flow on the remaining bridge can easily be consolidated into a single lane by guiding its second lane into the Mulberry/MLK intersection. Most importantly for traffic flow, the current very difficult left turn from northbound MLK to the westbound Franklin-Mulberry Expressway can be diverted into an uninterrupted right turn loop ramp eastbound on Franklin, then westbound over the remaining bridge. This will greatly alleviate congestion on MLK at very little expense to Franklin-Mulberry.

Most importantly, this solution will create large attractive new development parcels along Franklin Street that can be integrated into Heritage Crossing, Downtown and the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor as a whole.

New development parcels are shown in yellow. New expressway connections are in green. New local streets are in blue. The MTA "preferred" Red Line alignment is in red.

This solution is also fully compatible with the MTA "preferred" Red Line alignment (shown above), and in fact allows that alignment to work much better by creating new transit oriented development parcels. But it would also enhance any other Red Line alternative.

It is also compatible with the City's long-promised plan to build development "caps" farther west where the expressway enters a ditch, although any need or benefit for those expensive and limiting "caps" would be totally obviated by narrowing the expressway (see BaltiMorphosis.com .)

Focusing on the creation of new development value at this end of the Franklin-Mulberry corridor near MLK Boulevard is now particularly crucial because of the Social Security Administration's recent decision to vacate its huge complex which is the essential link between here and downtown.

Tapping into the economic energy of downtown and maximizing the value and benefit from redeveloping the Social Security complex is the key to activating the Franklin-Mulberry corridor. The MTA Red Line plan doesn't even attempt to do this. It only proposes one transit station in the entire highway corridor, in the median strip between Carey and Calhoun Streets, about seven blocks west of MLK Boulevard, which would eventually be underneath a proposed cap. Another station would be located along MLK to the south, but the nearly block-long width of the existing dual-bridge expressway would prevent this from serving any new development in the expressway corridor, just as it is already a major impediment to activity and growth.

An additional Red Line station, located just west of MLK Boulevard at the same grade as Franklin Street and the Heritage Crossing community, would be a perfect way for transit to contribute to this revitalization. The elevation changes created by the ditch itself would not be a factor, as these do not begin until several blocks from this point west of Fremont Avenue. All that is necessary is to get rid of the expressway bridge that separates the Red Line from Franklin Street.

Proposed expansion of Heritage Crossing, shown in yellow, across Franklin Street toward the Red Line (to the left) and across MLK Boulevard toward the Social Security Administration Building (to the right).

Such a solution satisfies all the goals that Housing Commissioner Dan Henson must have had in mind when he proposed knocking down the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway to extend Heritage Crossing, and to jump-start further development throughout the corridor. It was easy for him to simply call for the destruction of the entire highway and ditch in order to begin anew, but by making such a sweeping proposal, he ended up getting nothing done. It is far better to focus on that part of a problem which is the greatest impediment, rather than a blanket attack (which is probably also why drug abuse is still such a pervasive problem.)

To satisfy our goals, we need to look at all aspects of the relationships between the city, transportation and other systems to identify the highest priorities for change.

MTA vs LHF Plans

2009-09-01T09:05:00.001-04:00

MTA "PREFERRED" RED LINE ALTERNATIVE 4C

VS. THE "LOW HANGING FRUIT" PLAN

The MTA Red Line philosophy is "one size fits all". And if the shoe doesn't fit, the MTA will spend hundreds of millions of dollars extra to bury as much of the line as they think they might afford so no one has to look at it. If the crammed-in lines don't connect, they'll build yet another tunnel to make people walk between them. Then they'll cram the rest of the line through the communities that they can't afford to bury, whether anyone likes it or not.

The "Low Hanging Fruit" philosophy is a total opposite: Build a rail transit system that fits its environment, so that people will orient their lives to it. Take advantage of the opportunities that have already been planned to make the city more livable, and bring those plans into harmony with the rail transit system. Build transit to transform the city, not to cram it through.

By taking maximum advantage of existing infrastructure and building to a scale suitable to the environment, the entire Low Hanging Fruit plan would cost approximately the same as the MTA's $1.6 billion "preferred" Red Line plan. Since much of the LHF plan incorporates projects that are already being planned outside the Red Line anyway, the true comparative cost would actually be much less. Place to place, here's how the MTA's "preferred" Red Line plan compares with the "Low Hanging Fruit Plan":

DOWNTOWN

MTA PLAN - Downtown is the centerpiece and most expensive part of the MTA's "preferred" Red Line plan. Here they plan to bury the Red Line under Downtown's biggest and baddest traffic sewer, Lombard Street (shown above), which will remain as auto-dominated as ever, hostile to pedestrians and lined with wall-to-wall parking garages. Three stations are proposed here, with a fourth dropped for cost reasons. Construction will be very disruptive.

The transformation of Lombard Street will be limited only to new stairs, escalators and elevators to access these underground stations, and perhaps several new pedestrian spaces such as the one currently being rebuilt at the base of the former USF&G/Legg Mason tower at Light Street. The Red Line will be two blocks away from the existing subway under Baltimore Street, so the MTA intends to build a pedestrian tunnel under Light Street, with a moving belt sidewalk to enable riders to get from one isolated station to the other.

LHF PLAN - This plan will avoid hundreds of millions of dollars and years of construction disruption by having the Red Line share the existing Metro subway tunnel under Eutaw and Baltimore Streets. Transfers from one line to the other can then be made at any station simply by stepping off the train onto the platform.

Baltimore Street carries far less traffic than Lombard, so it can be suitably redesigned to become a livable urban street. It is also sufficiently wide at the critical locations, such as the Charles Center subway entrance shown above, to accommodate design creativity and traffic flow simultaneously.

The three key blocks are between Howard and Charles. The west end adjacent to the Baltimore Arena is already being used as a low-rent impromptu transit hub. The other two blocks can be transformed in concert with the renewal of Charles Center, especially the vacant Mechanic Theater adjacent to the Metro Station entrance (shown above), which provides sufficient room away from traffic flow to accommodate transit and people-oriented activities.

One potential concept for this portion of Baltimore Street is to build a short spur from the Howard Street light rail line to the Charles Center Metro entrance. In that way, the entire rail transit system would converge at a single point, which is the overall goal of all but the very largest successful urban rail transit systems.

All this can be done without the cost and disruption of new tunneling.

NORTH CHARLES STREET CORRIDOR

MTA PLAN - The MTA Red Line does not include Charles Street or any north-south corridor. The MTA has kept an arms length from the detailed professional planning study which has been sponsored by the Charles Street Development Corporation demonstrating the feasibility of a Charles Street Trolley. This $150 million streetcar line would travel from the Inner Harbor northward through downtown, Mount Vernon and Penn Station (Station North) to Charles Village, Hopkins University and Tuscany-Canterbury. The primary stipulation the MTA has made is that the $150 million Charles Street Trolley project not usurp any federal funding away from their Red Line.

LHF PLAN - The CSDC Charles Street Trolley plan should be planned as an integral part of the region's rail plan, and not just as a mere "circulator", both by intimately orienting it to Red and Green Lines downtown at the Charles Center Metro station (shown above), and also by making it part of a comprehensive streetcar network centered on the Inner Harbor. It should collaborate, rather than compete, with the Red Line for federal funding. If planned properly, it would dramatically increase the "reach" of the entire system.

INNER HARBOR

MTA PLAN - The Red Line would not serve the Inner Harbor, except through the back basement door at Lombard Street.

LHF PLAN - The photo above shows how the current Charles Street trolley plan might look in the Inner Harbor. However, we can do much better. The City is already planning to spend about $100 million to transform and rebuild Pratt Street and relocate intersecting Light Street adjacent to the Inner Harbor to create a totally new environment. This is a perfect opportunity to upgrade the streetcar plan to fully integrate it with the street plans, providing exclusive rights-of-way for streetcars on both streets. As the front door and most prominent window on the city, the Inner Harbor streets should fully become people and transit-oriented places instead of urban speedways.

The streetcar line would run in both directions along Pratt Street from Charles to Pier 5, and then through Pier 5 to Eastern Avenue and/or a new bridge to Fleet Street and Harbor East. The Light Street branch of the streetcar system would run the length of the Inner Harbor to the Science Center at Key Highway.

HARBOR EAST AND FELLS POINT

MTA PLAN - The Red Line would remain in a tunnel and would have two stations, one between Central Avenue and Eden Street to the east of Harbor East, and the other under Broadway in Fells Point.

LHF PLAN - The line would be similar to MTA surface street Alternative 4A, but with a crucial difference. Since it would operate as single vehicle streetcars instead of multi-vehicle block long trains, it would be able to easily run in the existing traffic lanes (e.g. eastbound on Eastern Avenue and westbound on Fleet Street). The streetcars would also need station stops of only about 60 feet long, about the same as bus stops, instead of stations occupying entire blocks in order to accommodate four car light rail trains.

Because of this, unlike in the MTA plans, virtually all on-street parking would be preserved. In turn, more stations could easily be provided, such as one near President Street serving Little Italy, along with the heart rather than the periphery of Harbor East. This is particularly crucial because of this area's strong demand for relatively short trips whereby convenience is more important than speed. The MTA's own study found that their surface alternative is more cost-effective (more riders and time savings per dollar) than the alternatives with tunnels.

CANTON

MTA PLAN - The Red Line would emerge from the ground at a large portal built into an enlarged median strip onto Boston Street near Montford Avenue. Boston Street would have to be totally redesigned to squeeze the heavy traffic into a single lane in each direction to accommodate the light rail line. There would be two stations in this median, one near the American Can retail complex near Lakewood Avenue and the other near Canton Crossing near Clinton Street.

LHF PLAN - The streetcar line would either remain in the existing lanes of Eastern Avenue and/or Fleet Street through Canton, or turn into Boston Street. Either way, the streets would remain approximately as-is except for modifications to accommodate the short station stops of about 60 foot length. All stops would be along the sidewalks rather than sandwiched between the heavy traffic in the median strip. Additional stops could easily be provided because of their low impact and the demand for more convenient service.

HIGHLANDTOWN

MTA PLAN - The line would enter an abandoned freight railroad right of way northeast of Boston Street near Conkling Street. It would have a station serving Highlandtown at the existing railroad bridge above Eastern Avenue (shown above, with the proposed Highlandtown Loft District).

LHF PLAN - The LHF and MTA alignments could be the same in this area, taking advantage of the livable transit-oriented design of the Highlandtown Loft District plan. However, an additional station could be provided to serve the rapidly growing Brewers Hill community, which could then also be made equally as transit-oriented as the Highlandtown Loft plan.

Alternatively, the streetcar line could use the portion of Eastern Avenue under the railroad bridges, which was originally built for streetcars and is severely overdesigned for its present use as a short four lane traffic expressway between Highlandtown and Greektown. Under this latter alternative, the line could proceed along Eastern Avenue through the heart of the Greektown business district to the Hopkins Bayview campus. It could then be extended to Dundalk and Turners Station as originally intended in the 2002 regional rail transit plan, but which has been rendered virtually infeasible in the MTA's "preferred" plan.

BAYVIEW

MTA PLAN - Two Bayview stations would be at the end of the line in the "preferred" MTA plan, one serving a MARC Commuter rail station and parking lot around the Norfolk Southern freight yard, the other terminating in the Hopkins Bayview campus. The fundamental problem with this arrangement is that the alignment creates a very long circuitous "S" curve that maximizes travel distance and time to downtown and for the entire line, despite about a mile of tunneling into downtown. Even worse, it makes it very difficult and untenable to ever extend the line beyond Bayview to Dundalk, Eastpoint, Essex or the suburbs beyond.

LHF PLAN - The much more efficient and effective concept is to extend the existing heavy rail Metro east from Hopkins Hospital to Bayview along the Amtrak right of way. The MARC station would be located at the large vacant site shown above, at Edison Highway and Monument Streets, which would also provide an ideal connection point for the entire MTA bus route network from the northeast and east. The streetcar line from Canton and Highlandtown could also conveniently terminate at this point, along its abandoned freight branch line.

The heavy rail line would then continue slightly farther along this right of way to Hopkins Bayview (seen on the horizon in this photo). Travel time would be only about 6 minutes to Hopkins Hospital and 9 minutes to Charles Center. The line would also be poised for further extension beyond into the suburbs, with eminently feasible branches to Dundalk, Eastpoint, Essex, Middle River and White Marsh.

There would be a third station near where the line comes out of the ground east of Hopkins Hospital near the Biotech Park and the Berea community. This is a very high density transit-oriented community.

FRANKLIN-MULBERRY

MTA PLAN - The Red Line would come out of the ground west of downtown near the interchange of MLK Boulevard and the infamous Franklin-Mulberry "highway to nowhere", where it would turn into the desolate and isolated median strip shown above. There would be one station on MLK Boulevard just south of the interchange, one in the median strip near Carey Street, and one just beyond the west end of the highway ditch at the West Baltimore MARC station.

LHF PLAN - The key to the LHF plan is to squeeze the Franklin-Mulberry Expressway down to four standard urban lanes from its current width, which was rendered obsolete when it no longer was part of the Interstate Highway system. The narrowed roadway would be shifted up against the south retaining wall of the ditch (to the right in the BaltiMorphosis.com photo montage above). The transit line would be located next to the narrowed road. This would free-up about a mile of multi-level space for a new fully transit-oriented community between Franklin Street and the transit line.

This plan would have a short tunnel spur off the existing Metro, north of the Lexington Market Station, and come out of the ground just west of MLK Boulevard. The MLK Boulevard station would be located just west of the tunnel portal adjacent to a southern expansion of the beautiful Heritage Crossing community. The other two stations would be located near Carey Street and the West MARC station.

EDMONDSON VILLAGE

MTA PLAN - The MTA plan would ram the Red Line into the already crowded Edmondson Avenue (Route 40 corridor) where houses are built right up to the street. This would require the elimination of one of the three lanes in each direction on this already congested major arterial highway. It would also require the elimination of much parking as well as left turn lanes. There would be only two stations, at Allendale Road and at Edmondson Village shopping center, so much of this large community would still find it much more convenient to take buses, which would get caught in the congestion created by the narrowing of Route 40.

LHF PLAN - Under the LHF plan, the Red Line would terminate for now at the West MARC station and would never run on Edmondson Avenue. Bus service would be upgraded in the community by extending premium Quick Bus lines into branches to Wildwood Parkway, Westview, Catonsville and other locations. Station stops would be upgraded to the same standards as the new streetcar service, but would remain located along sidewalks rather than stranded in median strips surrounded by whizzing traffic. Local bus shuttles would be provided to the West MARC station, which would serve as a comprehensive transit hub providing connections to everywhere.

Possible future rail transit extensions could serve Font Hill, oriented to a possible major new community on the site of the former vast Southwestern High School campus, FredHilton and Irvington, and many points to the west.

WOODLAWN AND SECURITY

MTA PLAN - The MTA had to narrow their tunnel under Cooks Lane to a single reversible track, because of their project's deficiency to federal cost effectiveness standards. This will seriously jeopardize service reliability. Homeland security is a major issue at the stations serving the federal SSA and CMS complexes. Stations under the MTA plan have had to be located far away from the buildings for security reasons, well beyond the parking lots, which will make the rail service unattractive to those who can drive. An additional station also had to be eliminated from the plan for the same reason. Two other stations will serve Security Square Mall and a park and ride lot on the former Interstate 70.

LHF PLAN - This area will be served by the enhanced Quick Bus and local bus service described under "Edmondson Village".

FEDERAL HILL AND PORT COVINGTON

MTA PLAN - The MTA plan does not include this area.

LHF PLAN - The plan would incorporate a recent proposal by the Baltimore City government to extend the streetcar system southward from the Inner Harbor through the Federal Hill community to Port Covington, on the shore of the Middle Branch. As can be seen from the photo above, this area has huge undeveloped parcels which used to be a railroad yard. The parcel shown is part of the printing press plant owned by the Baltimore Sun. Behind the printing plant is a Wal-Mart store.

The streetcar line would integrate Port Covington into the urban fabric of South Baltimore and greatly enhance its development potential.

Low Hanging Fruit Plan

2009-08-21T17:41:00.005-04:00

THE BEST, SIMPLEST AND MOST EFFICIENT RAIL TRANSIT PLAN - TO REPLACE THE MTA'S CONTRIVED CONTORTED "PREFERRED" PLAN

For years, the MTA and their cohorts have been accusing their opponents of trying to disrupt the Red Line process. What we're really doing is trying to make the process work.

After numerous delays of their own, the only way the MTA was able to come up with something that looked even superficially feasible was to inflate the ridership numbers at the last minute, after submitting lower numbers to the Federal Transit Administration in their Alternatives Analysis and Draft Environmental Impact Statement. While inflating the ridership numbers by increasing future population and employment projections, the MTA got rid of two stations and narrowed the tunnel under Cooks Lane to a single reversible track, in their last ditch effort to make the cost and benefit numbers work.

Thus, the MTA's "preferred" Red Line alternative was something that no one preferred during the process, based on data that was unavailable. Nor would anyone ever want to "prefer" their plan.

Anyway, the MTA process is over. I will no longer devise additional ways to make the MTA plans work. They've finished their process and have totally failed. Enough is enough.

HERE'S THE PLAN THAT ACTUALLY WORKS:

This plan that can be designed and built more quickly, easily and economically than the MTA's plan, without contrivances like the single track Cook Lane tunnel, the two block downtown pedestrian tunnel and the ram-jobs to squeeze surface light rail into the median strips of Edmondson Avenue and Boston Street. See diagram above.

1. The Red Line should use the existing heavy rail Metro tunnel that already exists under downtown between Lexington Market and Hopkins Hospital. This saves a huge amount of money and disruption and allows riders to transfer between the two lines by stepping on a platform instead of walking through a two block tunnel.

2. To the west, a short tunnel spur should be built north of Lexington Market to the Franklin-Mulberry corridor, where the line can be easily built to the West MARC Station. It can be extended in the future, perhaps along the Amtrak right of way to a new town on the site of the former Southwestern High School campus and to a transit hub at FredHilton, and perhaps eventually back to Edmondson Village and Security/Woodlawn.

3. To the east, a short tunnel should be built to the Amtrak right of way, where the line can easily be built to a new East MARC station and to the Bayview Research Park, with a future extension to Eastpoint, Essex and Middle River. Green Line extension options currently under study should be preserved.

4. The Charles Street Trolley project, already demonstrated to be feasible in a detailed study by Kittelson Associates, should be built from the Inner Harbor northward to Charles Village. Since this study was done outside of the MTA and city government planning processes, additional coordination will be required to integrate this plan into the comprehensive rail transit plan.

5. MTA's Red Line study already showed that the all-surface Alternative 4A was by far the most cost effective plan. It can easily be made feasible with negligible negative impacts eastward from the Inner Harbor to Harbor East, Fells Point, Canton and Highlandtown, by using single vehicle streetcars in mixed traffic lanes instead of block-long light rail trains in their own exclusive right of way.

6. The City government has recently proposed a streetcar line from the Inner Harbor southward through Federal Hill to Port Covington. This can be built as an extension of the Charles Street trolley.

7. The City has also proposed to totally reconfigure Pratt and Light Streets adjacent to the Inner Harbor. This should be done in a way that is fully in concert with the streetcar plans, to make these streets as transit oriented and friendly as possible.

8. Baltimore Street and its surrounding environment should be redesigned to serve as a comprehensive transit hub between Light and Howard Streets, with particular attention to areas around the escalator portals to the Charles Center Metro station. A two block spur from the existing Howard Street light rail line to the Charles Center Metro Station should be also investigated. This would enable all rail transit lines to converge at a single point.

Many variations to this proposal are possible. The important strategy is to sieze the opportunities that are readily available, not to try to contort a Red Line plan into locations where it clearly does not fit, as the MTA has done.

Hilton Terminal

2009-07-22T07:56:00.010-04:00

Hilton Terminal: The only solution to the west end Red Line mess

Nobody else has a solution, so I'll just have to do it. This plan original appeared in March in Baltimore Brew.

Now the MTA has said they need to save money by building only a single track tunnel under Cooks Lane. Obviously, if the MTA can't build a decent tunnel under Cooks Lane, that means they really can't build a tunnel under Edmondson Avenue either, which has become a non-negotiable demand of the surrounding community. But if the MTA ignores this demand, they will probably end up in court and the Red Line will die a slow death.

So in the spirit of reconciliation, I offer this plan. (I don't know why people think of me as a troublemaker. I only want to help.)

The Red Line should end at Hilton Parkway, where it will still serve the Edmondson communities, but it will not ram its way into them. Then build a terminal station/parking garage/Leakin Park Gateway where part of the obsolete Hilton Parkway interchange now stands on land that once belonged to the park.

I've sketched the rough concept in the Google Earth image above. The colors are:

RED - The Red Line - ending in a widened median of Edmondson Avenue at Hilton Parkway.

YELLOW - A multi-level structure built on what is now the north half of the Hilton Parkway interchange. The top level would be new parkland with a playground, commercial kiosks serving transit riders, and a gateway entrance to the rest of the park. The lower levels would be parking.

This photo shows the grade differential between Hilton Street (above) and Hilton Parkway (below) which enables the construction of an almost invisible parking garage in the hole created by the interchange. The houses in the background would then look out on parkland instead of a highway interchange.

MAGENTA - Hilton Parkway, straightened out and narrowed into the westernmost underpass under Edmondson Avenue. The ramps south of Edmondson would be unchannelized to accommodate traffic now using the ramps to the north.

BLUE - The existing southbound ramp from Hilton Parkway to Edmondson Avenue, which would be adapted to carry two-way traffic including some vehicles now using the ramps. It may be necessary to feed all southbound traffic from the north into this road to nullify the potential conflicts at the north end. A short bridge over the parkway below would provide access to the parking garage.

GREEN - New pedestrian and bike paths through the new parkland on top of the parking deck, leading to the Gwynns Falls Greenway shown in the upper right corner, at the Leon Day Park playfields off of Franklintown Road. Connections to this path would be provided over the top of Hilton from Harlem Avenue (shown, upper left) or Denison Street, as well as inside the existing underpass under Edmondson now used by northbound Hilton Parkway traffic.

Here is the Hilton Parkway underpass seen from the south, with Edmondson Avenue on top. Traffic would be consolidated into the road going through the left tunnel, and the right side would be renovated for pedestrians and bikes. If Edmondson Avenue can be widened sufficiently, a stairway up to the transit station in the Edmondson median could be provided.

This photo shows the gorgeous Gwynns Falls Valley which is now all but invisible and inaccessible to the community because of the interchange. The new pathway from Hilton/Edmondson to the Greenway Trail would be just to the left of this photo and the railroad tracks.

Implementing this plan would enable the Red Line to work with the community instead of tearing it apart. It would also save a ton of money compared with what the MTA wants to do (a squeezed force-fed unworkable Red Line), and two tons of money compared to what the community wants to do (an underground Red Line).

Something Borrowed, Something Red

2009-07-07T13:45:00.029-04:00

A RED LINE PLAN TO HARBOR POINT -

AND A DIRECT ROUTE TO COMPRHENSIVE RAIL TRANSIT TO EVERYWHERE

Revised diagram showing Fayette Street Red Line thru Downtown to Harbor Point, Orange Line to Jones Falls Valley and Yellow Streetcar System

Here's a Red Line plan that unlike the MTA preferred plans, would be rather easy and cheap to build, would provide tons of flexibility, would be very politically popular, and doesn't propose anything stupid.

Better yet, the MTA has already done most of the basic alignment planning on most of it, so they wouldn't be able to give their usual knee-jerk response about Red Line plans being outside their scope. In fact, most of this plan is assembled from other people's plans, not mine (with just a couple of exceptions where I don't know of any other plans.)

The best part is probably that this is a great way to create a comprehensive rail transit system relatively quickly, probably at no more cost than the piecemeal partial plan the MTA wants to do.

So without further ado, here is the full phased system, starting with:

1 - RED LINE LIGHT RAIL UNDER FAYETTE STREET

The Red Line would be built as light rail in a short tunnel under Fayette Street, where it would have a reasonably easy pedestrian linkage with the existing Charles Center Metro Station just to the south. It would emerge out of the ground just east of this point near Gay Street, adjacent to City Hall. It would stay on the surface of Fayette Street eastward to Central Avenue, then proceed southward on Central Avenue to the waterfront at Harbor East, where it would enter the vast undeveloped Harbor Point property (formerly Allied Chemical). The final termination point would be near the intersection of Caroline and Thames Street at the west end of Fells Point.

The Red Line would thus hit all the right spots - the Charles Center Metro Station, Harbor East, Harbor Point and Fells Point. It would also miss Canton, much to the relief of the active opposition there. Unlike the MTA's alternatives, it would provide great service to the heart of Harbor Point, jump-starting future development there and hopefully giving it an equity boost. It would also cost a whole lot less than the City and business community's preferred Red Line tunnel alternative, which includes its long scary pedestrian tunnel under Light Street.

Red Line on Central Avenue thru Harbor East, terminating at Caroline and Thames Street in Harbor Point development site. Fells Point is to the right (east), Inner Harbor to the left (west). Yellow Line would be streetcars on Fleet Street and Eastern Avenue couplet.

From Central Avenue westward, this alternative is identical to one the MTA has already mapped out. It is also very similar to what was originally defined as the "high priority" route segment in their system 2002 plan, before the extension to Bayview was added two years ago. The big difference is that it would serve the heart of the Harbor Point development. And none of this plan weaves any tight threads along any narrow streets.

2 - YELLOW LINE STREETCAR

This would essentially be the streetcar plan developed by the Charles Street Development Corporation, between Charles Village and the Inner Harbor. This plan has already undergone a rather rigorous professional feasibility study. Hopefully, the powers-that-be would choose to re-evaluate this plan in the context of its role as part of a full rail transit system, but it stands fairly well as-is. However, this streetcar line should not be a mere "circulator". It should be the backbone of a comprehensive local transit system serving the new enlarged multi-use downtown that we have heard so much about lately (or not so lately, if you've been paying attention.)

3 - GREEN LINE METRO EXTENSION BEYOND HOPKINS HOSPITAL

This is already supposed to be a "high priority" MTA project anyway. The Metro absolutely needs to be extended somewhere beyond Hopkins Hospital.

The standard MTA practice for alleged high priority projects that lose favor is to just let them sift to the bottom of the workpile where it is hoped that they will eventually be forgotten (see MagLev, Downtown Light Rail Loop, Inner City Shuttle Bugs, Downtown Glen Burnie/Marley Light Rail Extension, etc.). But it should not be forgotten that the existing Hopkins Hospital Metro station was built with no facilities at all for feeding the transit system, so it is totally inappropriate as a regional rail terminus. It also needs to connect to an East Baltimore MARC Station, for which the existing Metro is far better suited as a feeder to downtown than is the Red Line from a MARC Station in Bayview.

(Of course, the MTA thinks my idea of extending the Metro eastward along the Amtrak tracks toward Bayview, rather than northward under Broadway, is dumb. If that is what the MTA believes with all the intellectual fortitude at their disposal, I'm powerless to change them. Just extend the Metro somewhere.)

4 - STREETCAR LINE EXTENSIONS

Now is the time to giving serious thought to what an eventual comprehensive streetcar system should look like. The following are mere suggestions. I apologize that they happen to be my own suggestions, and not someone else's. Please replace them with your own if you wish.

(a) Eastward along Pratt Street in the Inner Harbor to Pier 5 to the Red Line corridor to Fells Point, Canton, Brewers Hill, Highlandtown and/or Bayview.

(b) Southward to Port Covington and/or the Key Highway corridor.

(d) Westward to Mount Clare, Carroll Park and Montgomery Park.

(e) Somewhere else.

5 - JONES FALLS LIGHT RAIL ORANGE LINE CONNECTOR

This has been proposed by Edison Properties as part of their proposal to knock down the lower Jones Falls Expressway to create attractive new development sites.

Running the Red Line under Fayette Street, then bringing it up to the surface near the JFX, would greatly enhance the Edison Properties transit plan. Shifting the expressway southeast of the prisons to divert traffic away from this area would enhance their transit plan still more.

This would allow the existing North Central light rail Blue Line from Hunt Valley to have a faster and better route into the heart of downtown and to the Charles Center Red Line station, facilitating transfers to the rest of the system. It would also include a direct link to Penn Station.

(Note: A previously shown light rail connection branch southwest of the Red Line from MLK Boulevard/Fayette Street to Mount Clare and Carroll Park would not be feasible under this plan, and would need to be streetcars instead, as shown on Yellow Lines.)

POSSIBLE OPERATING PLANS

Under this system, all of the following operating scenarios are possible. Major intermediate transfer stations are noted:

- Green Line Metro: Owings Mills to Lexington Market to Charles Center to Shot Tower to East MARC Station

- Blue Line Light Rail: Hunt Valley to Lexington Market to Camden Yards to BWI-M Airport or to Cromwell / Glen Burnie

- Red Line Light Rail: Social Security to West MARC Station to Lexington Market to Charles Center to Harbor East to Harbor Point/Fells Point

- Yellow Line Streetcar: Charles Village to Penn Station to Charles Center to Inner Harbor to Port Covington or to Harbor East to Canton/Highlandtown

- Orange Line Light Rail: Hunt Valley to Penn Station to Shot Tower to Charles Center to Lexington Market to West MARC to Social Security (Note: Orange Line connection previously shown to Carroll Park / Montgomery Park would not be feasible, and should be streetcars instead.)

- Purple Light Rail Line: BWI-M Airport to Camden Yards to Lexington Market to Penn Station to Shot Tower to Charles Center to Lexington Market to West MARC Station to Social Security (or some of the above).

And the best part is: Almost all of these were the ideas of the MTA, Charles Street Development Corporation and Edison Properties. Almost none of this plan was originally mine.

Jones Falls Expressway

2009-06-10T10:50:00.008-04:00

HOW TO REINVENT THE JFX:

BEND BUT DON'T BREAK IT

The key is to wrap it around the prison district, to distribute its traffic onto all the streets it should go to, and to allow the streets south of the prisons toward the waterfront to have a civilized environment, carrying only the traffic that wants to go there. Green is surface streets and highways. Red is elevated - southbound only. Yellow is new developable property.

Read the whole story at BaltimoreBrew.com

Click on the photos to see full screen views.

Collington Avenue

2009-05-31T21:25:00.008-04:00

COLLINGTON SHOOTING BEGS THE QUESTION:

HOW IMPORTANT IS URBAN GEOGRAPHY?

A small "Crime Brief" in last Thursday's Sun describes a typical senseless shooting on the streets of Baltimore: "Butchers Hill man fatally shot near home Wednesday". Except technically, the man did not live, nor was he shot, in Butchers Hill. But I live in Butchers Hill so the story really stuck out for me.

Real estate agents often exaggerate boundaries of more popular neighborhoods to catch people's attention, so it seems plausible that a newspaper might do that too. Several of my neighbors caught the error and notified the Sun, which soon corrected the online version of the story, although this time they omitted the neighborhood from the headline. Seems that Middle East doesn't sell as well as Butchers Hill.

So what's in a neighborhood boundary? If it's the waterfront, the answer is fairly obvious, but any urban street can be imbued with perceptions that can change property values, racial composition and feelings of safety that become no less real. The street of the shooting, North Collington Avenue, is a classic case in point.

The unit block of Collington Avenue between Baltimore Street and Fairmount Avenue is often cited as the nicest block of Butchers Hill, a gentrification success story. This block is set off by a slight zig-zag in the street grid which is fairly unusual for Baltimore, giving it a unique set-apart quality.

The next block north on Collington is where the famous Bea Gaddy used to have her semi-permanent tent straddling the sidewalk and street where she collected and distributed food for the poor. This block has long been a classic "transition zone" linking Baltimore's various subcultures, both underground and overground. The tent is now gone and the housing has been reverted and renovated to more purely residential uses.

The next block to the north, between Fayette and Orleans, is physically just like all the others, except that it is no longer within the political boundary of what is known as Butchers Hill, except to real estate agents. The real estate agents have had some success in promoting this block, shown by some renovation and increased property values. But the differences in values compared to only a block or two to the south can still amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This block is where the shooting happened.

Fayette and Orleans Street are geographically significant in that they both been set up to carry heavy through traffic, even though they are no wider than any other streets in the area and are still predominantly residential. The heavy traffic increases the boundary effect between Butchers Hill and Middle East in a way that has no permanent physical basis.

Finally, north of Orleans Street is where the murder victim lived - on the other side of the perceived boundary. Beyond this point, the urban street grid keeps on going in all directions, creating a quilt of perceptions and consequences that never ends.

Orleans Street's role carrying heavy traffic was solidified in the 1930s, long after its housing was built, when the massive Orleans Street Viaduct was built a mile to the west - still the closest thing in East Baltimore to an expressway. Fells Point and Canton fought a life or death struggle in the expressway war of the 1970s and 1980s to avoid this kind of fate. Orleans Street has the distinction of being the only street in East Baltimore where no parking at all is allowed in front of the houses. Heavy traffic whizzes by, just a narrow sidewalk away from the old houses.

Orleans Street's mirror image on the west side of Baltimore is the Franklin-Mulberry "highway to nowhere", where the entire neighborhood was destroyed in the 1970s to accommodate the traffic, rather than simply juxtaposing cars with houses as was done on Orleans. In the four decades since, planners have been promising to build a cap over the expressway to restore the urban grid to what it once was, but this promise has never been fulfilled. It wouldn't make much difference anyway, because the street grid only transmits the influences from one block to the next, it doesn't create them. The street grid is common to most of Baltimore's richest, poorest, most pristine and most blighted neighborhoods alike.

Nowadays planners have more sophisticated tools to alter perceptions. The recently announced "Roundabout Baltimore" program proposes traffic circles to interrupt the rhythm of the urban grid. Replacing an intersection with a roundabout is a powerful way to create a "place" of its own, apart from the influences of the surrounding area. A proposed roundabout at Key Highway and Light Street would call new attention to its own place, apart from the already very powerful influence of the adjacent Inner Harbor and somewhat less but still potent Federal Hill community. The choice of a design element inside the roundabout will also flavor this perception, although most roundabouts are set up to prevent pedestrians from getting to the epicenter.

The harbor itself must be regarded as Baltimore's most powerful geographic element, but streets are the most ubiquitous. It can even be argued that one of the most important attributes of the harbor is that it is a broad expanse of open space without any streets.

So how important is urban geography? Extremely important. On North Collington Avenue, geographic influences have caused four virtually identical adjacent blocks to evolve quite differently from each other. The urban grid transmits a powerful influence that spreads in all directions. It can mean life or death for communities - and for people.

Morgan to Canton Streetcar Line

2009-05-15T08:01:00.013-04:00

MORGAN TO CANTON STREETCAR LINE

Here's an idea that should expand your visioning horizons, and provide an escape route from the MTA's Green Line planning stalemate.

The MTA actually claims to be considering streetcars as a transit mode for the Green Line project from Hopkins Hospital to Morgan State University. This demonstrates that the MTA is ignoring the central overarching issue, which is what they should do with the heavy rail Metro which currently terminates suddenly and inappropriately at Hopkins Hospital. All it indicates is that the MTA is simply doing cookbook transit planning, and streetcars happen to be the fashionable mode du jour these days.

One of the biggest decisions that was made in the 1990s Metro planning at the the Hopkins Hospital station was when Hopkins pounded its omnipotent fist and said there would be no transit transfer hub at this station. So unless the MTA actually thinks they can get Hopkins to change their mind about building a transit hub so that riders can transfer from streetcars (and buses) to the Metro in front of their vast and venerable hospital campus, the streetcar option is a non-starter.

And all the land that was once available for such a facility has all been gobbled up by development anyway. Oh well, the MTA has often been deluded by less than this.

All this is particularly ironic because the MTA has refused to consider streetcars for the Red Line project, where they would make tremendous sense for the Inner Harbor to Fells Point to Canton leg, where the dense urban development and short trip lengths make streetcars a natural. But streetcars have only recently become a cause celebre and made their way into the transit planning cookbook.

The central question must be answered first: Where should the Metro be extended beyond Hopkins Hospital? This is not a question of which mode will be used. It will be heavy rail Metro, period. And it must be extended somewhere because it needs a multi-modal transfer terminal facility, like every other such major transit line in the civilized world.

The MTA has been so obsessed with badmouthing heavy rail in its conduct of the Red Line study that it cannot even confront the obvious fact that the Green Line extension must be heavy rail.

Of course, since the MTA has categorically rejected heavy rail on the Red Line because of a lack of perceived cost effectiveness, there is no way that it is suddenly going to become cost effective for the proposed run from Hopkins Hospital up to Morgan State University.

So MTA is stuck between a rock and hard place. The only possible transit mode for its Green Line project, heavy rail, is infeasible. This is what happens when you define your transit planning studies in such narrow ways, and then vainly hope that the all purpose cookbook can show you a recipe for it.

Back to the central question: Where can the heavy rail Green Line be extended in a cost effective manner beyond Hopkins Hospital?

Only one answer has ever emerged to that, and I came up with it about 15 years ago, and have been ragging about it on this blog since its inception.

The Metro can be brought up out of the ground along the Amtrak tracks and then terminated nearby at the large Edison-Monument landfill site, also known as Orangeville. This plan is short, sweet, inexpensive and provides almost limitless flexibility for future expansion in all directions in any mode - commuter rail, heavy rail, light rail, streetcars and buses.

So here is one multi-purpose plan: At this Orangeville Metro terminus, which also would include a MARC Commuter rail station, the MTA could build a very long but relatively inexpensive streetcar line to serve both the Green and Red Line corridors. Streetcars are normally not appropriate for a lot of long trips, but the orientation to this transit hub would make it more of a feeder route serving many more short trips, rather than a line that one would take from the beginning to the end.

Here's where it could go:

Starting at Morgan State University, the streetcar line would travel along Hillen Road, southward to Lake Montebello. It would wrap around the lake, then travel through Clifton Park. This could be a catalyst for the revitalization and redesign of the park and its golf course, which now has a heavy used road running right through it. The streetcar line would make a much more pleasant and compatible companion to the golf course than the road does. Through most of Clifton Park, the streetcar line would then follow Rose Street, an abandoned and crater strewn byway in the park's outback.

This photo shows the proposed alignment looking north from Sinclair Lane in the foreground, crossing Belair Road, then entering Rose Street and Clifton Park at an existing underpass under the CSX railroad. Rose Street goes between the Lake Clifton High School and a cemetery.

From Belair Road, the streetcar line would follow Sinclair Line to Edison Highway, both of which have plenty of room for the tracks, and then on to the Orangeville Transit Hub.

The Green streetcar line would then become the Red Line, and continue to proceed southward to the vacant railroad right of way next to Haven Street, down to Highlandtown and Greektown, Brewers Hill, and Canton Crossing. It would serve the same feeder function to Metro and MARC as the Green Line, but in the opposite direction. At Canton Crossing it would join Boston Street and proceed along the Red Line corridor to Fells Point, Harbor East and the Inner Harbor.

The MTA is going to need a new cookbook.

BaltiMorphosis

2009-05-14T12:54:00.013-04:00

Introducing BaltiMorphosis.com

Bravo, Peter Tocco. He's taken my abstract concept for fixing the Franklin-Mulberry corridor and brought it to 3D graphical model life in his new website, BaltiMorphosis.com , for anyone to see, feel and even change for themselves using Google Sketchup software, which can be downloaded from a link provided on the site.

The image above is from his model, showing how there is enough room in the existing "ditch" for a compressed highway that still accommodates all the traffic, the Red Line, a bikeway, and a local street with transit oriented development on both sides, including multi-level buildings on the north (left) side. These buildings would front on both the new local street and existing Franklin Street, integrating this area with the existing community. But this image is only the tip of the iceberg of what Tocco has created. You need to go to BaltiMorphosis.com to really experience this.

Unfortunately, instead of healing this depressed area, the MTA wants to put the Red line on the path of least resistance, most likely in the existing highway median strip with expressway traffic whizzing by on both sides. So thank you Peter Tocco, for palpably demonstrating just how pathetic the MTA response really is.

My account of how BaltiMorphosis.com came about is posted on BaltimoreBrew.com , aided and abetted by its editor and my ghost writer, Fern "Brewmistress" Shen (playing the ghost role both literally and hauntingly).

I don't understand this computer modeling stuff, but there is a whole computer literate generation out there (plus a few oldsters too) who are ready to take to it to demonstrate how Baltimore can be visually planned from the grassroots up, and BaltiMorphosis shows how to do it.

This image shows the scene from the local street Tocco has designed for the ditch. It is derived from the photo montage that is on the BaltiMorphosis home page, which uses Flash software to show superimposed images of the existing barren conditions, the MTA's plan to slap the Red Line into the middle of the highway, and this livable alternative. With a click, the images dissolve into each other, highlighting the differences in a way that nothing else could do.

BaltiMorphosis addresses change in Baltimore in a completely different and refreshing way than what I am able to do here. I named this website Baltimore InnerSpace because I wanted to use it to describe what we don't see as we move around Baltimore. I mostly don't think of this stuff from observation. I think of various places in the abstract and then figure out how their relationships can be changed so that they can work better together.

But it can be nebulous, so I thank those of you who have plowed through all the verbiage I've posted here, in coming up with ideas that I'd like to believe can make Baltimore work better. BaltiMorphosis.com brings it all to life.

2009-05-04T16:32:00.003-04:00

"Could you diagram your suggested relocation of the Maryland ramp? Not sure of your location."

- Anonymous writes

Sure. It's shown in blue on the photo map below.

I proposed this a long time ago when I was a city planner, while the city was reconstructing the Jones Falls Expressway. The city decided to rebuild the ramp in the same location as it was before because the engineers thought that there would not be enough weaving distance if the ramp was moved. I showed how the engineers' analysis was faulty but I lost anyway. Yes, the weaving distance would be reduced, but not enough to cause problems, and any disadvantages of that would be more than compensated by the fact that the ramp itself would accommodate the traffic far better.

N0w the city wants to squeeze a whole new extension of Martin Luther King Boulevard into this space. How in the world they could pull that off is a total mystery. (I really don't want to know.) It would seem to ruin the whole campus atmosphere the University of Baltimore has been trying to create. Its impact on the Cultural Center (Meyerhoff Hall and Lyric Theater) and the State Center redevelopment are also a question. Perhaps all the new traffic generated by the allegedly "transit oriented" development was the rationale for the MLK extension in the first place.

The property just south of this ramp proposal is used to store postal vehicles - not exactly the most vital use in this area. It could stay if need be, but I don't see why it would.

It's sort of nice to be able to indulge in a slightly long-winded explanation of this.

Oliver Street

2009-04-30T15:21:00.000-04:00

DUMPED-ON OLIVER STREET
TO BECOME

'BOOK LOVER'S BOULEVARD'

Reprinted from BaltimoreBrew.com

Oliver Street’s bizarre “S”-shaped curb separates the JFX ramp from the also-odd dumpster alcove. Penn Station’s in the background.

Little Oliver Street is arguably Baltimore’s most geographically important two-block-long street, connecting some of the city’s choicest real estate. At the east end is Midtown, Charles Street and Penn Station. At the west end is Bolton Hill, Mount Royal Avenue, light rail and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In between is the University of Baltimore’s . . . dumpsters.

For decades, the city has done its best to discourage both pedestrians and vehicles from using Oliver Street to traverse this critical two-block east-west path, meaning that Penn Station is only accessible along a north-south axis. (Yes, it’s true, Oliver Street resumes on the other side of I-83. We’re just discussing this little stand-alone chunk of it.)

Now, at long last, Oliver Street may get a chance to live up to its potential, thanks to a new Barnes & Noble bookstore currently under construction.

At first, the city’s neglect of the little street was benign. There has never been a crosswalk or traffic signal where Oliver ends at Charles Street, in front of Penn Station. But when the Jones Falls Expressway was rebuilt in the 1980s, the substandard ramp to Maryland Avenue was also rebuilt in a way that completely cut off Oliver, making the ramp an even sharper alignment. This made life even more difficult for pedestrians.

A mistreated street

Human nature abhors a vacuum, so the shut-off Oliver Street became a natural location for the University of Baltimore to stick its dumpsters and ad hoc parking.

When the light rail line was built in the 1990s with a station at Oliver Street and Mount Royal, a spur was built to connect it to Penn Station. The spur has never functioned effectively. There are only two-trips per hour on it these days. A more sensible solution would have been to make Oliver Street more pedestrian-friendly and encourage people to simply walk the two blocks to the station.

View of Penn Station from the non-existent Oliver Street crosswalk across Charles Street

Lost opportunity

Things could have improved for poor Oliver more recently, when the city rebuilt the Charles Street bridge in front of Penn Station, with a new platform plaza extending its front yard down to Oliver. But when they did this, the City also eliminated still another pedestrian crosswalk on the expressway ramp on the left side of Charles Street. There is nothing to abate the steady stream of traffic entering this ramp across the Charles Street sidewalk.

The city also has a plan is to build an extension of Martin Luther King Boulevard into the expressway by 2020 which would have to cross Oliver Street. Its hard to see how this could possibly coexist with the University of Baltimore’s plans, but it’s still on the books in the Baltimore Metropolitan Council’s 2007 regional plan.

With its dumpsters, the University of Baltimore has, until now, been a co-conspirator in the city’s effort to make Oliver Street as uninviting as possible, but the Barnes & Noble bookstore deal changes all that.

The little street that could

The University’s original plan for a 275-unit apartment building and 1,250 space parking garage now under construction did not include a bookstore. But now that it does, it should make Oliver Street a little two-block linchpin to provide an attractive and direct connection between the Penn Station area, the University of Baltimore and Maryland Institute campuses and the Bolton Hill neighborhood.

The most dramatic change to Oliver Street will be the new “signature” law school building now being planned at its east end at Charles Street. Surely, law school alumnus and benefactor Peter Angelos will demand a crosswalk for Oliver Street if the city doesn’t provide it. Or the law students will get some great litigation practice.

The city should take the next step and relocate the hairpin expressway ramp directly onto Maryland Avenue and away from Oliver Street. This would provide a safer ramp for traffic, eliminate a pedestrian hazard, and allow Oliver to be a normal street instead of an alcove for dumpsters. It would also be a heck of a lot easier to do than building the planned connection to MLK Boulevard.

A place to shop in Bolton Hill

Moving the expressway ramp would also create new parcels for active street-oriented retail and other development along the rest of Oliver Street. Some 14,000 square feet of retail had to be eliminated from the University’s plan to accommodate the 20,000 square-foot Barnes & Noble store, including its requisite Starbucks cafe. This lost space could thus be recovered, and demand created for more retail space, spurred by the presence of the bookstore. Bolton Hill, although one of Baltimore’s most attractive neighborhoods, is woefully lacking in retail, and Oliver Street is a natural place to put it.

An Oliver Street bustling with college students, train riders and book lovers - what could be more natural?

Stable Oil Prices

2009-03-05T07:29:00.003-05:00

BAD NEWS: DEMAND FOR OIL HAS "STABILIZED"

The world oil price has tumbled with falling demand, caused not by preachy tree huggers abandoning their gas guzzlers, but by the economic recession, which knows no environmental ethic.

But now oil demand has reportedly stabilized, not because the economy has recovered, but because people know a bargain when they see it. At less than $2 a gallon for gas, people would rather spend their money cruising around the sprawled-out countryside searching out desperately priced going-out-of-business sales than productively and contentedly staying in one place. Why focus on rebuilding the inner city when there are plenty of cheap houses out in the boondocks where one can drive to and fro on cheap gas?

Gasoline is the currently favored currency of economic survival: Guzzle gas in the suburbs instead of investing in inner city schools, housing, and corner grocery stores. Some cities like Baltimore are doing OK right now relative to the rest of the country, but this should be our time to shine. Cities like Baltimore should be the key to a new productive economy, not places that are merely not doing as badly as they could be.

The oil barons have us where they want us. Now that oil demand has stabilized, they can dig in their heals and prepare us for the next round of massive oil price hikes. But this time we will be even more ill-prepared than before, because we are still trying to dig out of a recession. And instead of digging out by building on a new solid foundation of resource conservation, we're doing it on the fleeting illusion of cheap gas.

So enjoy the party while it lasts. Because it won't.

Cap and Trade

2009-02-27T08:21:00.004-05:00

OBAMA'S CAP AND TRADE PLAN IS THE SHINING STAR OF HIS DEPRESSING BUDGET

Most of President Obama's budget plan is smoke and mirrors, but his "cap and trade" plan for emissions sticks out with refreshing clarity. It could be a model for restructuring the entire country's oppressive tax system.

Never mind whether you believe in the religion of global warming. A free market system for using emissions to replace income as the basis for taxation is a big winner that can bolster the economy.

All but $15 billion of the revenue raised in 2012 by Obama's cap and trade system would be used for income tax cuts. The rest would be used for renewal energy research. Market pressure spawned by the emissions cap should generate further alternative energy research and demand. This should be a win-win for the economy and the environment.

Politicians can continue to argue who should get the income tax cuts, while they also argue about Obama's very flimsy assumptions about tax revenue from other sources which will probably blow his deficit projections through the roof. Obama can also continue his disingenuous gloat about how he is trying to reduce the deficit, when in his last breath the week before he was raising the deficit to breathtaking levels.

But there seems to be an emerging re-consensus that income taxes are the poison that stalls the economy. Income taxes are taxes on production, and production is the energy that drives the economy. In the long run, consumption does not drive the economy, whether it is done by consumers or (even worse) government manically spending money they don't have.

President Reagan understood this when he pushed "supply side economics" in the 1980s, which got us out of our stagflation malaise caused by the Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter years. Clinton understood it too, proclaiming that "the era of big government is over". His tax hikes were not that harmful because they were counter-cyclical and easily assimilated by the momentum of the boom years, at least in the short run.

But pure income tax hikes are not flexible enough to ebb and flow with the business cycle. Consumption taxes can be. So Obama's "soak the rich" income tax plan is a cause of grave concern, although to the extent that it compensates for regressiveness ("soak the poor") in consumption taxes, it may be acceptable.

The next step is to extend the new "cap and trade" mindset to energy taxes. We need a big gas tax with similar income and payroll tax rebates to make them revenue neutral. We need to use market generated energy conservation to bolster the productive income producing sector of the economy, and keep our money out of the hands of Hugo Chavez and other foreign oil barons. Hopefully, this can be done while gas is still affordable and those would-be oil extortioners are still reeling .

Perhaps in the next several years, we will be ready for the kind of large-scale income tax reform promoted by Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee and others. And our policies in energy, transportation and the environment will lead to a new sustainable prosperity instead of runaway government spending and deficits.

Retooling

2009-02-26T17:00:00.003-05:00

RETOOLING THE INNER WORKINGS OF INNERSPACE

Time to get back to Innerspace. What you might notice here now is a bit different from what was.

I've been devoting all my blog time lately to Baltimore Brew, the online brainchild of Fern Shen, formerly of the Washington Post, which is devoted to bringing real local Baltimore journalism to the blogosphere, while still maintaining that blog vibe as well.

I'm honored and flattered that Fern actually recruited me of all people, among all her real journalists, to be part of her noble enterprise. So you can find some of my articles at http://www.baltimorebrew.com/ , although a lot more of them are on her cutting room floor, owing to her attempts to mold me to her exacting standards.

Actually, what she tried to do was whip me into some semblance of journalistic and blogospheric shape while somehow trying to maintain my inimitable inscrutable self-indulgent penchant for 2500 word epic tomes. But while she's very good, she couldn't perform miracles. I haven't figured out if she won her bet with Colonel Pickering to turn my Liza Doolittle into an H. L. Mencken, but I realize there is no turning back.

And I still can't seem to fit the mold. It has confounded both Fern and me as to whether what I'm writing now is Baltimore Brew or Baltimore Innerspace, so we have concluded that it is a bit of both. I haven't exactly resolved to consciously write shorter, more diverse and more timely pieces, but it seems to have just turned out that way.

Please visit us at Baltimore Brew and keep visiting me here.

Redlining

2009-02-26T16:40:00.004-05:00

CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS ENCOURAGE MORTGAGE REDLINING

The Baltimore City Council is now considering a bill that would radically change the foreclosure process on city mortgages. Back in the bad old days, there was an ugly word to describe situations in which the mortgage process was treated differently in one place than another - redlining.

Back then, redlining happened because of racial discrimination. Now, it is being embedded into the law. Back then, the problem was not enough mortgage money flowing to redlined areas. Nowadays, the problem seems to be too much mortgage money - flowing in a speculative financial climate where borrowers get mortgages too easily.

The City Council wants to make mortgage negotiation in the city much different than it is anywhere else, giving mortgage holders the power to retain home ownership for an entire year despite defaulting on a loan, instead of just two weeks. This will inevitably cause banks and other mortgage companies to examine the Baltimore City real estate market in quite a different way than they treat it anywhere else.

The potential year gap between default and foreclosure would then become a strong factor in the equation that banks use to determine what mortgages to issue and what not to issue. After many years in which urban advocates have steadfastly tried to get banks to increase lending in the city, this would certainly work the other way. Mortgage money would dry up. Just like in the old redlining days.

The city real estate market is already far different than it is anywhere else, which is a significant cause of city squalor. The City's property tax rate is more than double what it is anywhere else in the state, which is a strong disincentive to investment and puts a heavy strain on the home affordability equation.

In addition, the city property tax rate increase is capped at only four percent per year, which is an extremely strong incentive to "sit" on your house rather than selling to a new owner. Many city homeowners are thus strongly encouraged to stay in a house that is not well suited for them, rather than selling to new owners and moving to a more suitable house, condo or retirement community. When people sell their house, the tax rate suddenly jumps up to the current assessment, without regard to all the years of rate caps.

There are also many regulations imposed on developers, such as the so-called Inclusionary Zoning law, which attempts to mandate developers to build low income housing.

Call it what you will, but when a mortgage company treats one place differently than another, whether it is because of racism or laws or whatever, its redlining.

Monument Street Marketplace

2009-02-26T13:54:00.007-05:00

NEW CITY DEVELOPMENT WOULD SQUANDER
RAIL TRANSIT OPTIONS

A unique opportunity - 27 vacant acres along the Amtrak tracks in East Baltimore, perfectly suited for a comprehensive transit hub, but the City just wants another shopping center.

The Baltimore Development Corporation has recently selected a developer for a 27 acre vacant site in East Baltimore that was supposed to be a MARC Commuter Rail station in the MTA 2002 regional rail plan. But the proposed development makes no effort to exploit the potential for a transit station.

The Monument Street Marketplace would include a 183,700 square foot shopping center, probably anchored by a large supermarket and/or "big box" retail, and 63,000 square feet of flex office space - the kind of space that accommodates truck loading docks next to offices. There would probably be close to a thousand surface parking spaces if accepted standards are met. The site is located on a former landfill bounded by Monument and Madison Street, Edison Highway and the Amtrak tracks.

The Maryland Transit Administration's 2002 regional rail system plan, still the most recent document guiding overall transit development, calls for a MARC Commuter Rail Station for the "Purple Line" at this location. The 2002 plan designates this a "Phase One Priority Project", along with the Red and Green Lines, although no project planning has been done on it so far.

Unlike the rest of the MARC system which serves the entire corridor to Washington DC, the initial phase of the Purple Line would provide local service only between Madison Park and Middle River. This would require an extension of the existing Metro subway, also called the Green Line, beyond its current terminus at Hopkins Hospital. The first subsequent station would be at Madison Park, serving the Purple Line, and eventually the Green Line would extend in a giant arc northward to Morgan State, eastward to Hamilton, northeastward to White Marsh and then southward around to the same Middle River station near Martin Airport that now serves MARC and the proposed Purple Line.

This proposed Green Line extension is now in trouble because the MTA has repeatedly stressed that heavy rail transit is now too expensive to be cost effective. Because of this, the MTA has ruled out heavy rail as a vehicle mode for the Red Line. However, the Green Line is already heavy rail, so ruling out further heavy rail construction would be tantamount to ruling out the entire project.

Meanwhile, even without heavy rail, the Red Line has gotten too expensive to meet federal cost effectiveness standards because of pressure from many quarters to build much of it in tunnels instead of on surface streets.

With the problems facing the Red and Green Lines, it is no wonder that the Purple Line has faded onto the back burner. Into this vacuum, the Baltimore Development Corporation has recently selected a development plan for the site with little or no regard for its potential transit orientation.

ALL THEIR EGGS IN ONE RED LINE BASKET

As far as rail transit is concerned, the MTA and the City are betting everything on the Red Line, even though the favored alternative fails the federal cost effectiveness test. The Red Line would also have a new East Baltimore station on the MARC Commuter rail line, but it would be located farther out north of Bayview, which would require a cumbersome and expensive overhead pedestrian connection to avoid the adjacent intermodal freight yard.

The key to the success of any MARC station is to make the MARC line heading to the east toward Middle River and Harford and Cecil Counties into a true commuter route into Downtown Baltimore. In this regard, Penn Station simply has not worked.

To make the Red Line work as a connection from MARC to Downtown, it would have to be fast. That means that it must be built to a very high standard, which means extensive tunneling under Downtown, Fells Point and perhaps Canton, which further increases its price tag beyond the bounds of feasibility and affordability. Moreover, if the MTA succumbs to the pressure to bury the Red Line in East Baltimore, it will make it very difficult for them to say "no" to the many voices insisting that they bury it in West Baltimore as well.

If the Red Line process fails, the MTA may find itself with no feasible rail transit projects available at all.

To get out of this bind, the MTA needs to maintain its options for the vacant unencumbered 27 acre site at Edison and Monument. Building a MARC station and a Green Line connection to this site would be the easiest, cheapest and most effective way of connecting both to Downtown Baltimore. The Green Line could emerge from underground immediately north of the existing Hopkins Hospital Metro Station, then run east along the Amtrak tracks to the new station. There is no need for an expensive tunnel, no freight yard in the way, and the rest of the rail transit line is already built into and under downtown and then out to Owings Mills.

Perhaps best of all, it will allow the MTA to build the Red Line through Canton, Fells Point and Downtown as a simple, inexpensive, cost effective and politically popular surface streetcar line. It will no longer have to be big and fast enough to handle long distance commuter trips.

The shopping center plan for the Monument landfill site needs to be put back on the drawing board, until the MTA gets its act together to nail down a coherent rail transit plan for East Baltimore. Large vacant urban properties adjacent to the MARC system are too precious to be wasted on anything except transit and transit oriented development.

Stimulus in Maryland

2009-02-06T19:37:00.004-05:00

INFRASTRUCTURE STIMULUS:
MARYLAND HAS ALREADY TRIED THAT

New I-95 spaghetti at the Beltway

If economic investment in infrastructure is such a big stimulus to the economy, Maryland should already have gold flowing in the streets.

The state got a huge jump on President Obama's approach to economic stimulus when it went into a seemingly bottomless hole of debt last year to start construction of the InterCounty Connector highway in Montgomery and Prince Georges County. That highway was originally supposed to cost about $2 Billion, but now nobody really knows what the price tag will be. It will certainly cost much more than that.

Construction to widen Interstate 95 north of Baltimore is another $1.4 Billion injected recently into the local economy, and the final cost of that is still unknown as well. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge from PG County to Virginia is also still going on, injecting still more billions into the economy.

Compared to all that, the Maryland share of the trillion dollar Obama stimulus plan for transportation will amount to pocket change - approximately half a billion. Vice President Biden was in the state yesterday touting $2.9 million (with an "m") to renovate the Brunswick MARC station as an example of the new stimulus spending. Maryland Transportation secretary John Porcari pointed out that the old platform at Brunswick was tripping up women in high heels. Does this mean that high heels are a key to economic recovery?

The Brunswick MARC station may be a great project, but it was certainly a low priority for MDOT since they spent billions elsewhere before they got to it. What projects does the state of Maryland think are really important? The InterCounty Connector and I-95 widening, of course. These are the projects that the state had decided are worth spending billions on. Not the projects in the current stimulus package.

Every project needs to be evaluated on its own merits. If the MARC station project was worth it, then it shouldn't have had to wait.

The problem with infrastructure spending as an economic recovery tool is that it focuses money into a relatively small sector of the economy, where investment is inflexible and is not labor intensive. True economic recovery would be broad based, where investment in monetary and human capital would naturally flow to those sectors where it would provide the greatest and most labor intensive returns. Obama's economic advisers reportedly say that infrastructure is the best sector to accomplish this, but economic studies have always persistently said that small business is the greatest engine to economic growth.

Another big problem with infrastructure is that the payoffs happen over a very long period of time - decades rather than months. Maryland will not be seeing the true impact of the InterCounty Connector, Woodrow Wilson Bridge, I-95 widening and other highway projects - for better mobility and/or greater sprawl, etc. - for decades. And who knows? By that time, maybe women's high heels will be passe.